Addiction Recovery Basics

To help fight addiction cravings, it is often useful to identify under what circumstances cravings occur. Cravings for in engaging in your addiction can come from both positive events and negative events. They can be caused by people you're with, your location, or something you're doing. Cravings are intellectually irrational, but that doesn't stop the gut wrenching pull toward your old addictive behavior. Here are some quick tips to deal with your cravings:

Change your surroundings, if there is a person, place or thing making you uncomfortable, sometimes immediately excusing yourself from the situation can help.

Call somebody right away whom you know is safe, be it a friend or family member, a counselor or sponsor. Talk about it.

Play the tape forward. Realize that you are not really talking about just one instance of using; you will continue engaging in your behavior with disastrous results. Look at the possible outcomes and don’t romance the drinking or drugging.

Break time down into manageable sections. Remember we are not talking about sobriety for the rest of your life, only for today. If that seems unmanageable, do what it takes to stay straight until dinner, or for the next hour, or even five minutes. The idea is to buy yourself some time cravings will pass

Do some physical exercise. Get your mind off things, take a shower, take all walk, go for a drive, go shopping, anything to stop brooding on the thought of possible use.

Anyone who tries to recover from addictions will have using thoughts. Cravings will come and cravings will go, it can be very disturbing and upsetting trying to figure out where these using thoughts come from. It is only prudent to avoid people places or things that can trigger using cravings. But sometimes they come from nowhere. The important thing is not to identify some much where they come from but to hold fast to your conviction and not to act on them. Do not act on the craving. We hope you can add this to your arsenal of sobriety tips and sobriety tools.

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