Get Coping Skills

Coping with your addiction is the next important step that you have to take in your journey to eliminating your bad habits from your life. Humans have the innate tendency to face the things or obstacles that come their way and the same idea applies when you have been addicted to a substance or an activity.

You need to cope with it so that you can emerge as an entirely different person, a person completely devoid of any bad habits. Through these coping skills, your journey will become much easier on your part and before you know it, you will be on your way to total recovery.

Cope With Your Addiction With These Useful Skills

If you want to recover from your addiction, the first and most important rule that you have to remember is that you can never recover from it by simply stopping the habit. Recovery will only happen if you have successfully created a life where it will be easier for you not to use. If you refuse to create a new life, then, all the factors that brought about your addiction will definitely catch up with you all over again.

However, it does not mean that you will have to change all aspects of your life and everything in it. However, there are several behaviors and things that are getting you into trouble and these will continue to cause you trouble unless you let go of them. Holding on to your old life during your recovery will make you do less. So, what are these common coping skills that you need to develop in order to attain complete recovery from your addiction?

Stay Away from High Risk Situations

The most common high risk situations can be described by HALT, an acronym that stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. While these situations cannot be completely avoided, being aware of them will help so that they will not catch you off guard, allowing you to prevent those tiny cravings from developing into major urges.

Here, the best thing that you can do is take extra care of yourself. Do it by eating healthier meals, try to relax to let go of your resentments and anger, mingle with other people so you don’t feel alone and improve your sleeping habits so that you will not feel tired the next day.

Practice Relaxation

There are several common reasons why some people end up using alcohol and drugs. They use these things to reward themselves, relax or escape. To put it simply, alcohol and drugs become people’s way of relieving tension. As mentioned earlier, changing your life is the first rule of recovery and relaxation is not just an optional aspect but an essential part of a successful recovery. There are plenty of methods to relax. These can range from something as simple as going for a walk to those more structured methods such as meditation.

Be Honest

Addiction, most of the time, requires lying. You need to lie about the fact that you are using drugs or alcohol. Once you have developed an addiction, it will just become easy for you to lie. And when you are already good at lying, there will come a time that you will lie even to yourself.

This is the reason why addicts sometimes no longer know who they are or what they believe in. Honesty is and will always be the best policy if you want to stop your addictions. Being true to those around you and to yourself can make you go a long way towards recovery.