How Mindfulness Can Help Overcome Addiction
Mindfulness therapy has become an increasingly popular method in the field of rehabilitation and addiction recovery industry. More and more drug treatment centers are using this practice to treat patients and help them recover from addiction. The reason why it has proven to be an effective addiction recovery treatment is that it helps the patients to become mindful of what they are doing at the moment. Mindfulness is much more than just sitting around in silence. It helps you stay sober by keeping you from doing things mindlessly.
When you go about your day and do the daily activities mindlessly, you aren’t focused on what you are doing. Being mindless makes you more prone to do the things that harm your body, such as alcohol and drug abuse. Mindfulness helps you keep focused on your present by being fully aware of your physical, emotional, and mental experiences. Meditation is one way to practice mindfulness. It helps you refocus your thoughts and become fully mindful of your own situation and your surroundings.
This post lists down and explains a few ways mindfulness helps in addiction recovery.
Helps Reduce Your Aggressive Response:
Any unpleasant and stressful situation can trigger relapse and can make the patient use drugs or alcohol again. Anything from a common work mistake made by your colleague to a car that cuts you while driving can make you angry and react aggressively. Such situations cause you to experience feelings of annoyance or anger. Mindfulness helps to reduce the aggressive responses to such conditions. Regularly practicing mindfulness helps your brain to evaluate the situation before instantly giving an aggressive response. Thus, having more control over your mind helps you stay calm and avoid the feeling of anger or stress that can trigger a relapse.
Helps Focus on the Present:
It is quite common to experience feelings of anxiety during your recovery, even if you are not facing any stressful situation currently. While it is normal to worry sometimes but being overly anxious can ruin your recovery goals and cause you to seek substance to relieve your anxiety. Practicing mindfulness can help you become less anxious. It helps treat anxiety by focusing your thoughts on living every present moment of your life. When you are mindful, you will focus on every step you take toward recovery and appreciate your small achievements. Thus, mindfulness helps you cope with anxiety and focus on your recovery rather than worrying about the fear of relapsing or failure.
Helps Deal with Bad and Stay Positive:
Most people use a substance to get relief from stressful situations and to forget their problems for a while. In doing so, they get addicted to that substance and start using it regularly. The addict uses alcohol or drugs to escape from the issues they are facing. Practicing mindfulness helps you deal with your problems positively by recognizing that they exist. It enables you to see the bright side of every dark situation so that you learn to deal with bad instead of finding an escape. Running away from your issues is not a solution. Thus, being mindful improves your concentration so that you can think more clearly to resolve your issues rather than using drugs to forget them.