In early recovery, it’s a great time to start setting new patterns to help shape your new life trajectory. Getting better sleep, building deeper connections with people, and learning new coping skills are all critical. Exercise, too, can make an essential difference for newly sober people.
Health Benefits of Exercise
Exercise can do a lot of essential things for your physical health. It can help you loosen up when you’re feeling the bodily effects of stress. Regular aerobic exercise, including walking, can help keep your blood pressure in check. And people who exercise tend to sleep better.
The more you sweat, the easier it is to flush any toxins from your body. People who detox are flushing toxins for months (and up to a year and a half) after detoxing from drugs. Exercise can help you move these toxins out of your body more quickly.
Mental Health and Fitness
You’ve probably heard by now that exercise is an integral part of maintaining your mental health. In the era of COVID-19, it’s a little more challenging to do but still tremendously useful when it comes to banishing negative moods or alleviating your anxiety. Luckily, there are now online fitness classes and plenty of videos you can use to establish a daily routine. (Check Evenbrite or Youtube.)
According to the National Library of Medicine, exercise can perform a variety of important functions to improve your mental wellness. Aerobic exercises improve symptoms of depression, reduce anxiety, and improve cognition. Many people who describe a “brain fog” when they’re experiencing mental health issues will explain how exercise helps them think more clearly and make more rational decisions.
Getting Help for Addiction
Addiction is a disorder that can affect the mind, body, and spirit, yet recovery is possible. You’re never alone! We help people from all walks of life begin the journey to recovery. Learn more about our programs and how we can help by calling us at 855-976-1495
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If you’re considering drug and alcohol treatment, you may have a lot of questions. What will the environment be like? How will you be treated? Will you have access to medication-assisted treatment? What will the treatment community be like? These are all reasonable questions you can prepare to ask. One question that is often overlooked is the size of the community you’ll be in when you opt to go to treatment. Treatment staff size can make a huge difference in the way a person responds to drug and alcohol treatment.
Treatment Staff Size Matters
Many people don’t realize that there are many benefits of a small treatment staff.
While many treatment centers offer a one-size-fits-all approach to recovery, others are more focused on the individual. A smaller staff and clientele helps provide more individual attention. This is especially helpful for people who struggle with mental health disorders or those who have opted for medication-assisted treatment.
While in treatment, staff is able to monitor clients and spend more time one-on-one with them. Recovery is a journey, and while everyone can use tools to make the journey easier, there are many individual choices that staff can help clients make along the way.
After all, while no one became addicted overnight, each person seeking recovery has their own background and life story. For people who need help, a cookie cutter model treatment program isn’t the best option.
Learning Trust and Intimacy
Many people who enter treatment have trouble with personal relationships. Some have trauma in their backgrounds. It’s hard to open up when their are still wounds from the past.
A small treatment staff and community can help clients become more trusting and learn intimacy — not the sexual kind, but the friendship and family kind. Learning to trust can also help clients learn to become trustworthy themselves again.
Creating bond with others – not just staff, but others in the community as wel – can help heal old wounds and create a new perspective when it comes to relationships. Addiction is a disease that wants to keep you lonely and isolated, but recovery offers new tools, relationships and friendships that can help you fight those lonely feelings.
With a smaller staff comes more personal attention and help when a person needs it, helping people cope with problems and issues as they arise.
Getting Help for Addiction
Are you looking for help for a drug or alcohol program? We offer a recovery community of experience, strength and hope. Our program here at Cycles of Change can assist you with Medication-Assisted Treatment, one-on-one counseling and group therapy. We’re here when you’re ready. Give yourself a chance by calling us at 855-631-3460.
Relationships are essential to a happy and healthy life. Many people who take the path to recovery from addiction describe themselves and their lives as “broken” when they first get sober. Addiction can create broken dreams, broken friendships, and broken families. The thought of getting clean and sober can sometimes seem overwhelming when you think about these things that seem so broken. Yet people pick up the pieces and put them back together all the time as they learn to recover and rebuild their lives as a person in recovery.
It takes courage and willingness to take the path that heals. With therapy, treatment, and some work, you can learn to strengthen and maintain the friendships and family relationships that you have.
Addiction is a Family Disease
You may have felt alone when you were addicted, but the truth is you were never the only person harmed by your disease. Other people often develop their own coping behaviors when they love somebody who is addicted to drugs or alcohol.
They may develop poor coping skills and lash out, or begin to withdraw from the relationship. That doesn’t mean they don’t care – most likely, they’re afraid and don’t know what to do.
People who love addicted people often have a lot of hurt and pain. Some people respond by feeling relieved and grateful when their loved on finds sobriety, but others may feel angry and mistrustful of the process.
These are problems they will need to work through just as you have to work on your own recovery. They may benefit from family therapy or one-on-one therapy, or even joining a 12-step group such as Al-Anon that focuses on supporting families.
Changing Your Relationships
For every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction. With a change in a family dynamic, there is more change! If you, as an addicted person, begin to become more independent and reliable, somebody who has been picking up the slack feels less useful. Everyone will adapt to your new way of life in their own time.
Working on yourself is the best you can do when you first start out in recovery. If you want to strengthen your relationships, you will have to start establishing trust. Having boundaries is also essential. These are issues you can work on in recovery with your own therapist.
Getting Help for Addiction
Recovery from addiction is a journey, not a destination. We can help you begin to live a fulfilling life and transform your life. Getting help may sound scary, but the first step is easy – just reach out. You can contact us to learn about your options at 855-976-1495.
Many people who are recovering from addiction have unresolved issues such as trauma or mental health disorders. One of these types of disorders, called attachment disorder, is used to describe people who have difficulty connecting with others and forming friendships and relationships with them. For most people, an attachment disorder develops as a baby or child, when they had trouble connecting with their mother, father, or other caregivers for a variety of reasons.
Attachment disorders are a genuine problem that can affect people throughout their life, causing them problems in their daily lives because of the dysfunctional relationships that they can cause.
Many people who have a problem with addiction or other mental health disorders have attachment issues. Finding a way to have healthier relationships helps people begin to heal from them.
What Causes an Attachment Disorder?
Just like some other mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress, an attachment disorder can often stem way back to childhood. Some people who experience it may have experienced neglect or abuse, but this is not always the case.
An attachment disorder may form for other reasons, such as trauma or environmental issues. For example, a child with a single parent may have to work long hours and have little time to spend with them daily.
Why Do People Develop Attachment Issues?
Children from birth to adulthood, are dependent on their guardians to help provide for them. Babies will cry or hold on tight to their parents when they’re scared or in need of attention. They will cry when they need a diaper change or are hungry. If the parent or caregivers don’t react to a baby or meet their emotional needs, there may be trouble with forming attachments. These issues can continue throughout life.
Eventually, these behaviors can translate to social skills for children, and then later in adults. Some people have trouble growing into new actions as adults because their needs went unmet as children.
Therapy or treatment can help a person begin to heal from attachment problems and form healthier relationships. Everyone deserves to have healthy, fulfilling relationships, but when a person suffers from attachment issues, they may have trouble understanding what that entails.
Many people in recovery from addiction have attachment issues to a certain extent. Addiction is a lonely disease, and many people self-medicate out of loneliness or to numb the pain of their dysfunctional relationships.
Getting Help for Addiction
If you or somebody you love suffers from addiction, you’re not alone. You deserve to take your life back and begin healing from the pain of addiction. We help people from all walks of life begin the journey to recovery. Learn more about our programs and how we can help by calling us at (855) 409-8869.
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