The Importance of Habits in Sobriety

If you are struggling with addiction and interested in getting treatment, you have probably seen that many recovery centers have a strong emphasis on building habits in sobriety. If you go to a residential program or an outpatient program, you’ll have structured classes that meet at the same time each day. You’ll have specific timeframes for meals or other activities. Everything will be scheduled and conducive to building daily habits. But why does this matter?

In this blog, you’ll learn more about the importance of building habits in sobriety and how this can help you maintain recovery long-term. Ritual Recovery is a trusted drug and alcohol rehab in Asheville that can help you learn how to build habits for a healthy, sustained recovery. Contact us to learn more about our programs.

Willpower

You have a limited amount of willpower each day. Willpower is what helps you manage emotional outbursts, choose a healthy meal over a sugary one, and apply coping mechanisms to your stress instead of turning to drugs and alcohol to deal with it.

Thankfully, willpower, like a muscle, can be strengthened, and by exercising it every day, you can build more and more willpower. One of the key ways to exercise that willpower is by creating habits in sobriety.

The Relationship Between Habits in Sobriety and Willpower

Habits in sobriety are an excellent way to avoid applying your limited daily willpower to unnecessary tasks and saving it for the more important or demanding tasks.

Consider this:

Sarah gets up in the morning with an alarm clock and puts on an outfit that she set out the night before. She makes the same breakfast after she showers and goes to work. She only works part-time, so when she comes home, she has a salad topped with chicken and beans for lunch or a chicken stir-fry. She works in her garden or cleans the house for an hour before she does a workout. In the evenings, if Sarah finds herself stressed, bored, or depressed, she is in a much better position to tackle those feelings responsibly because of her habits of sobriety throughout the day. She didn’t use any willpower to decide:

• What to wear 
• When to wake up
• When to go to work
• What to eat for breakfast or lunch
• When to workout
• When to clean her house

Now consider this:

Marcus gets up at whatever time he wants. It takes him a few minutes to decide what to wear usually because half of his clothes are unfolded and in the laundry. He changes his mind about breakfast every morning, and sometimes he works out, but sometimes he doesn’t. He has a job with flexible hours, so he shows up when he feels like it, and his current boss is very accommodating. When Marcus encounters stress in the evening, he is much more likely to succumb to that stress, isolation, or other negative feeling because he hasn’t used habits in sobriety throughout the day, so he’s used all of his willpower to decide things like:

• What to wear
• What to eat for breakfast
• When to wake up or go to work
• Whether or not to workout 

Top Habits in Sobriety

When you are in recovery, the best habits you can form relate to your daily schedule and coping methods. 

Sleep

One of the first areas where you can establish healthy habits in sobriety has to do with your sleep. Sleep is integral to regulating hormones, hunger, and mood. By going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time every day just as you would in recovery programs, you can establish healthy sleeping habits.

Nutrition

Eating a balanced diet goes a long way toward regulating mood, helping to combat depression, and anxiety. What you eat also has a direct impact on your energy levels and your cognition, making it an important influence on how effectively you can sleep at night and how much energy you have to get through your day.

Exercise

Physical exercise will go a long way toward helping you repair the damage to your body that substance abuse can cause. It can also help strengthen your mind and your body so that you are better able to tolerate temporary discomfort, learn new skills, develop self-esteem, and overall enhance your well-being.

Self-Care

When you establish regular habits in sobriety for self-care, you put yourself in a position to better handle unexpected stress or triggers. For example, if you always meditate in the morning or when you are stressed in the afternoon, you’ll learn to use meditation as a coping technique whenever you face stress instead of turning to using substances.

Developing Healthy Habits in Sobriety with Ritual Recovery

At Ritual Recovery, our partial hospitalization programs and intensive outpatient programs provide opportunities for clients to develop healthy habits in sobriety. With several types of group therapy, clients have chances to develop routines as it applies to coping mechanisms, eating habits, communication, and internal reflection.

When you work toward the development of healthy habits, you set yourself up for success long-term because you take away so many of the decisions that you would otherwise have to make throughout the day that eat away at willpower. This means you have more willpower left for the harder decisions that crop up unexpectedly, the things that would otherwise increase the risk of relapse.

Don’t wait. Call our North Carolina addiction treatment center today to learn more about setting up healthy habits for sobriety.