Recovery Advice

One of the most common challenges the family members of people who struggle with addiction face is how to help their loved ones without enabling them. Family members must know what it means to enable an addicted loved one, and they must know how to recognize enabling behavior when it’s occurring.

Drinking alcohol is a part of the holiday festivities for many people. However, just because alcohol consumption during the holidays is an accepted cultural occurrence, that does not make it a good or healthy thing to do. Studies increasingly show alcohol as having harmful effects on people’s health, and CDC data increasingly shows alcohol as contributing to serious societal health issues and a growing number of deaths annually. Given these findings, Americans should do everything they can to reduce their alcohol consumption during the holidays.

A recent study has backed up long-standing assertions by addiction experts that exercise is helpful for people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. The study compiled data from 43 previous studies to examine if previous hypotheses about exercise being conducive to building strength in sobriety are true.

A 2022 study revealed that there is measurable success in assisting recovering alcohol addicts to look at recovery from the perspective that it is a lifetime activity. Conversely, addicts who seek to get better lose out to some degree when they view recovery as a sudden change in their behavior that requires one intervention and can then be mostly forgotten about afterward.

It has been common knowledge in addiction treatment communities that recovering addicts should change their environment once they complete treatment. Now new research provides a strong biological argument for why this fundamental principle is crucial to recovery.

Boredom is a dangerous condition for a person determined to stay sober. It's smart for anyone in recovery to know the best ways to prevent themselves from feeling bored. The payoff is not only sobriety but often includes achievement of personal goals, attainment of greater skills, and the chance to help others.

It’s been understood for some time that individuals newly in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction should not re-enter the same environments they were in when they were abusing substances. While this has always been a common sense view, there is new scientific research to provide evidence-based confirmation for why recovering addicts must seek new environments.

During my early sobriety, one of the biggest obstacles I found that kept me from living a life of recovery was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to have fun without alcohol. Looking back on this now, I can see how crazy that thought was...

Making the decision to go to rehab and get help to overcome addiction is a big step, and one of the most important ones on the road to recovery. Sticking through a rehab program and successfully completing it is another big milestone along the way.