How to Avoid or Manage Common Temptations After Rehab

Despite the fact that the overall goal of checking into rehab is to enable you to return to your family and friends without being weighed down by addiction, it can be challenging for one to adapt to a normal life with their loved ones after spending substantial time in the supported and isolated environment of inpatient rehab treatment. As a matter of fact, it has been proven that individuals who’ve recently been discharged from rehab and have completed their treatment have the highest relapse rates.

There are a number of steps that you can take in order to control or prevent these relapse triggers in your daily life according to The River Rehab. The following are some of the things you can do:

Join a Support Network After Drug Addiction Treatment: One of the most effective ways of assisting addicts to manage normal life situations and avoid relapsing after rehab is finding a post-rehab support network. A support network isn’t an online social network such as Facebook, rather, it is a real-life group of friends, family members, work colleagues, and neighbors who know about your struggle and can provide the necessary assistance during the difficult period of temptation.

Establish Structure in Your Life: While in rehab, you will learn how to develop structure in your life. Normally, drug addiction programs will advise you to come up with a daily schedule so as to bring order into your life and reduce the state of confusion. In addition, it helps you to significantly minimizes the time that you are idle which eventually leads to relapsing or developing a new addiction. It is crucial to keep yourself busy engaging in productive work, for example, hobbies, exercise, classes, family activities, and any work that helps you avoid having a lot of idle time alone in which you start thinking about things you yearn for.

Cognition Helps You Avoid Relapsing: Utilizing cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT to make yourself more conscious of your emotional and psychological processes helps you to avoid going the way of failure. You will be more attentive and alert without having to stress yourself out worrying and unexpectedly ending up using different substances as you try to calm yourself. With  CBT, you will objectively recognize the triggers without your emotions controlling you. Hence, you can prevent them and remain stress-free without essentially being careless.

Improve Your Surroundings: Prior to going home after being discharged from rehab to get back to your normal life, request your loved ones or people you trust to get rid of all drug-related paraphernalia in your home, for example, bongs and stashes of drugs. Avoid areas that may cause cravings of drugs. Also, develop a solid support system by keeping around your sober people and those who will look after your interests. You will definitely need people who care about you and desire to see you sober again instead of just caring for yourself.

Don’t Ignore The Possibility of a Relapse: Never be complacent as carelessness on your part can leave you vulnerable to relapse. It is quite easy to let your guard down and feel at peace thinking that your addiction phase is over just to backslide to smoking, drinking, and drug abuse. After treatment, you might assume that it is fine to go to places you engaged in substance abuse or meet old friends who still use drugs or encourage you to get back to doing drugs.

In Case You Mess Up, Seek Help and Start Over: Never lose hope. Whenever you slip, pick up the pieces and try again. Recovery through rehab isn’t a direct transition from addiction to normal life. Rather, it is filled with peril, slippery slopes, and twisting roads that get you nowhere or lead you back to square one. Aftercare gives you the guidance you need on your path to sobriety and the normal life you had before you started using drugs. Due to relapse, it is difficult for addicts to remain clean.

How to Explicitly Manage Rough Patches: Considering that you are only human, you can easily slip up despite being aware that you are supposed to keep triggers and temptations at bay. In case you go through that rough patch and relapse, urgently seek post-care support in order to resume your sobriety journey. However, if the matter gets worse, consider going back to rehab. Save yourself by acknowledging that slipping up will happen and relapsing entails the recovery process. In addition, when faced with relapse, don’t give up but put twice the effort to become drug-free.

Don’t Beat Yourself Up: Always remember that even after you relapse, you can still help yourself and avoid a far worse situation by remembering the addiction treatment recommendations, techniques of meditations, and cognitive behavioral therapy you’ve gotten while in rehab while you can still remember them. Your rehab wasn’t for nothing, it’s just a minor slip. You shouldn’t allow the time you’ve lost be for nothing with you ending up becoming an addict again. Prevent falling into an endless cycle of you being in and out of rehab by learning from your mistakes.

Set Long-Term Goals: When you set goals for the future, it will be easier for you to control temptation in case any triggers arise. You need to understand why you want to remain sober (be it to cease being the oddball family member, stop ruining your relationship with close friends and acquaintances, or to regain the confidence and pride your children had in you) in order for you to avoid slipping up. Handle things one step at a time, and day by day gradually forgetting how it feels like being high or stoned.

Develop Fresh Healthier Habits to Replace Your Vices: Leave behind old bad habits and embrace better ones. Furthermore, this is essentially what you learn in rehab in addition to managing withdrawal symptoms. A European Journal of Social Psychology study found that it usually takes more than two months for one to adapt to new habits or make them second nature. In essence, one has to continuously and enthusiastically do something for 2 months before being able to do it on autopilot. When forming new habits, ensure that they are positive so as they can compensate for the damages caused by all your drug abuse.

Search for Outlets that Offer Community and Support: It doesn’t matter where you reside or where you initially chose to go to rehab, but you should easily find positive outlets that give support and community in the period after your rehabilitation. It is crucial to surround yourself with encouraging people, your loved ones, for example, friends and family members who still care about you, and fellow ex-addicts at a support group. In addition, go to their counseling sessions and engage in their meet-up activities.