In The News
Coping Mechanisms – How Healthy Are Yours?
We strive to develop positive coping skills in recovery because they help us deal with urges, cravings, and our triggers to use. Remember, coping skills can be healthy or unhealthy – and are the sum total of ways that we deal with stress, trauma, and other problems we face. In our addictions, we got into habits of using negative coping skills to deal with life: in fact, drinking and drugging...
Ever find your mind racing down a path you don’t want to travel?
Ever find your mind racing down a path you don’t want to travel? Catastrophizing about the future? Engaging mental gymnastics inside your head to debate points or events now irrelevant? Why do we torment ourselves so? My experience indicates the answer is this: automatic thinking. Sure, part of this emotional turmoil is related to post-acute withdrawal. But even for many of us with years of...
Metaphors of Recovery – 2/15/2015
So many principles of recovery....and life...cross my mind when I'm out hiking. Helps me maintain perspective. It's not just about the exercise and the fresh air and sunshine. Patience, nurture, faith, acceptance, healing - rebirth. The tree reminds me that the scars from a life of addiction can be channeled into something beautiful and enduring. The petroglyphs remind me that others have come...
Fitness Tips – Getting Started – 2/10/15
The best exercise is the one you want to do! While I want to encourage readers to get active in recovery, there are some important things to consider first, especially if you've recently stopped drugging and drinking. In early recovery we are more prone health and injury problems. This is because we been sedentary, malnourished, and (probably) smoking; and the drugs/alcohol caused damage to our...
Developing the Exercise Habit!
How can we develop new, productive exercise habits? We know that our old, drug-taking habits produced instantaneous, abundant neurotransmitter-cascade “rewards.” In fact, drugs provide approximately 10 times the neurochemical reward that “normal” healthy or desirable activities do (4). This was why it was so easy to get hooked. Those addiction-oriented pathways will be with us forever. But the...
Healthy Recovery Eating Tips
Remember, in early recovery, your body cannot tell the difference between drug/alcohol cravings and food cravings! Follow the following tips for success: Eat regularly. Do not skip breakfast or any other meal. Have five or six small meals per day. Example: breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner. Manage your cravings for sweets with fresh fruits such as apples, grapes,...