Master Alcohol Recovery with These Real Tips from Alcohol Rehab Centers

Alcohol rehab doesn’t just offer a drug and alcohol free period of time for you to learn about recovery. It offers you advice and guidance to help you throughout your journey, even years after you have left a treatment center.

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, roughly 1.5 million people were treated for an alcohol use disorder in 2014. The tips that follow were given to many of them and used to help support and maintain their recovery.

For more recovery tips, call 888-646-0635Who Answers?. Our treatment experts are prepared to answer all of your questions.

Be Kind to Yourself

Keeping a positive outlook will help you avoid relapse.

During the time you spent actively abusing alcohol, you probably got used to beating yourself up. Every time you backslid or weren’t able to limit your alcohol intake, you felt like a failure. Every time you woke up and couldn’t remember the night before, you felt like a loser. Every argument or poor sexual choice left you reeling.

Those feelings are normal and everyone has them, especially during active addiction and in the early stages of recovery. But, you need to work on allowing yourself to make mistakes. You won’t succeed at everything the first time that you try and that is OK. If you can’t forgive yourself, you won’t be able to maintain recovery.

Remember the Importance of Nutrition, Sleep, and Exercise

Your general health will have a great impact on your recovery. By maintaining a healthy diet, getting a proper amount of rest, and keeping physically active, you will remove many of the physical and emotional stressors that make people want to use. When you are active, you are boosting your endorphins; when you sleep enough, you get proper REM rest; and, when you eat well, you can increase serotonin. All of these things improves your feeling of well-being, which leads to increased self-esteem.

Take Baby Steps

During recovery, you must give yourself time, pace yourself. If you fall victim to all-or-nothing thinking, like “If I can’t go to a 12 step meeting every day this week, my recovery is a failure”, then you run the risk of sabotaging the progress you are making.

When you measure yourself against an impossible ruler, you undermine your self-esteem because you cannot possibly do what you require of yourself. Instead, focus on the things that you accomplish and the things that you do well. Give yourself adequate time to complete goals. Congratulate yourself when you do.

Surround Yourself with Positive People

Recovery causes a natural amount of stress and dealing with it responsibly and healthily will be your priority. When you have negative people in your life, they will attempt to shift your priorities. They will create problems and complaints and look to you to comment on them and/or fix them. You will feel much better and be better able to meet your own challenges when the people around you are encouraging and enthusiastic. Positive people will model turning problems into opportunities and they will even help you to solve your own issues.

6 Super Useful Tips to Improve Your Recovery from Alcoholism

Adjust Your Outlook

It isn’t easy to change negative thoughts into positive ones, but it can be done and learning how to do it can improve your recovery outcomes. When you get caught up thinking that you can’t keep going or that you don’t deserve to get better, it’s time to shift your perspective and improve the situation.

Instead of wallowing in negative thoughts, you will be forming positive, proactive ones. Negative thoughts tend to turn into self-fulfilling prophecies; by eliminating them, you give yourself a greater chance of succeeding.

Don’t Make Comparisons

While you are in rehab, you will connect with other alcoholics and you will have the same experience at 12 step meetings and group therapy sessions. It is natural to look at other people grappling with addiction and to compare your progress to that of others. But, you need to consciously let go of this impulse.

Every recovery is different and it is important that you give yourself permission to set your own path and walk it in your own way. Otherwise, you can get too caught up keeping up with the Jonses.

To find an alcohol rehab center that can help you start your recovery journey, call 888-646-0635Who Answers?.