Addiction Recovery

So you’ve gone a few weeks without alcohol, the days are starting to get easier and the physical feelings are starting to settle.

You can do more, flare up less and the world is not such a hostile place to be apart of.

All is going well - until?

One day you wake up and the reasons that initially drove you to stop drinking have started to fade away. Life is good, your starting to hurt less and the guilt that haunted you for so long, is starting to become a distant memory. Your confidence is growing and you begin to think you can handle anything, perhaps even a drink?

Its all too easy to be fooled into believing that we can cope, that just a few drinks with friends wont hurt and that The Next Day we could just start giving up again. What we forget in the joy of our new found freedom is, that perhaps we are only one drink away from slipping back into the nightmare again.

Being an alcoholic means that you have a vulnerability, not a weakness, just a physical part of you, that cannot drink alcohol in a controlled way. Over the years this vulnerability has eroded away your mental resistance, in the need to satisfy its craving.

Can you guarantee The Next Day will ever happen?

Tomorrow or The Next Day is not an option for us, we all know it will never come. For The Next Day will lead to The Next Day - to The Next Day - to The Next Day - ad infinitum (it will continue for ever!).

You are only one drink away from awakening the beast inside, are you certain you could lay it to rest again?

Least we forget?

Reminding yourself daily of what this vulnerability has done to you and remembering the reasons why you gave up, is key to staying sober. A few years back in my search to end my battle with the booze, I came across a simple method to re-enforce my will to succeed, and I would love to share it w Read the rest of this entry »

There are many quit smoking products on the market today. The trouble is that most of them don’t address the hardest part about quitting smoking, which is the psychological addiction to cigarettes.

Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer and a whole host of other physical ailments. Everyone has seen the pictures of diseased lungs and the trauma caused by cigarettes yet continues to smoke. Why is it so hard to stop smoking? The answer is we have programmed our minds to accept cigarettes as an integral part of our lives.

We smoke when we have a cup of coffee in the morning, we smoke after a meal and we smoke on our work breaks. We are conditioned to associate many of our daily activities with smoking, making it nearly impossible to resist the urge and quit smoking. Now we could change our activities and try a new routine but that would probably be harder than quitting smoking.

I have tried the nicotine gum and nicotine patches. All that did was feed my nicotine addictions and make me want to smoke more. When I was chewing the nicotine gum I found myself craving the gum where it got to the point that I always had the gum in my mouth. When I used the patch I also chewed the gum. Now I was getting a double dose of nicotine and making me crave it more.

What we need to do is re-program the way we think about cigarettes. We have to learn to not associate smoking with our daily activities and remove it from our mind set. We have to trick our minds into believing that we are non-smokers. Every time I wanted a cigarette I would remind myself that I was a non-smoker and why would I smoke a cigarette. It started to work but I found that my associations to smoking were starting to win me over.

I re-doubled my efforts and began using hypnosis as a way to re-train my subconscious mind into accepting the reality that I am a non-smoker. Read the rest of this entry »

It is really difficult to get geared up stop drinking alcohol. Here are 7 tips to get started on the road to recovery:

1. You have to do it for yourself - You hear this and it’s true. Not your family, significant other, or whoever might be asking you to stop. If you don’t do it for yourself, you will be starting out with a handicap.

2. Physical exercise - Limited studies have shown that the people who get exercise while trying to stay sober are less likely to relapse. It is possible that the reason is at least partially that exercise tends keep the person in a more relaxed state.

3. Give yourself rewards - People forget this aspect of recovery, and it is an important one. Rewards help to keep you in the game. The more frequent the better.

4. Don’t guilt trip yourself when you fail - Getting angry with yourself for a temporary setback is non-productive, and will make anyone more prone to give up. If you slip, forget it and move on. This is alcohol addiction, one of the biggest challenges you are ever going to face.

5. Get some kind of outside help - Whether it’s A.A., some kind of therapy, or a proven formula to get sober, utilize something outside of your normal scope of thinking and experience. Left alone to ones thoughts and methods is probably not the best thing, since those thoughts and methods contributed to the addiction in the first place.

6. Spend as little time alone as possible - For single people this can be a tall order. If you can’t surround yourself with people, get out more which helps generate a fresh perspective on life.

7. Develop a new daily routine that does not include drinking alcohol. Get up earlier, incorporate some exercise into the daily routine, the possibilities are endless. After all, to stop drinking is to make a fresh start on its own.

Everyone is an indiv Read the rest of this entry »