10 Ways Sleep Helps Speed Recovery
Getting a good night’s sleep is always a recommended way to awake refreshed and renewed. It’s even more important when you’re in recovery.
Recovery
Hobbies Can Help You Stay on Track in Recovery
Drinking heavily or using drugs takes a lot of time and energy. Once you’re in recovery, you’ll likely have a big void in your life. Finding positive activities to fill the empty hours is key to not only a successful recovery, but also a healthier, happier life. Hobbies — from rock climbing to antique collecting …
How to Be a Good Friend to a Recovering Addict
Recovering addicts need all the friends they can get. Social support from friends, family members and the community is essential to a good recovery and to maintaining abstinence. As the friend of someone in recovery, you can be an important part of that social circle, but you might not be sure how. It’s normal to …
Author Tells of His “Ultra Recovery”
Now that David Clark has run 100-mile races through mountains and deserts, it’s hard to picture him during his first weeks of sobriety. To the stunned clerks of a running store, he announced his plans to run a marathon. His basketball shorts had a waist size of 50. He weighed 320 pounds. When he got …
Applying the 12 Steps to Your Therapy Practice
Sometimes the best advice we could receive is the advice we’d give others. That’s why the guidance in the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoot support groups could be just as helpful for therapists as it is for their patients.
The Mindful Path to Addiction Recovery
The mindfulness movement has its roots in Eastern philosophies and meditation techniques such as those found in Tibetan Buddhism, Indian yoga and Chinese Taoism. The common thread connecting these philosophies is the idea of slowing down, focusing on the breath, the present moment, and directing one’s attention to the immediate experience of life. The goal …
Video Game Addiction: A Recovery Story
Andrew Doan, MD, PhD, is a trained eye surgeon, father of three, a professor — and a recovering video game addict. Astonishingly he made it through medical school at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine while playing a real-time strategy game like StarCraft for 7 to 14 hours a day. He’d started gaming at the …
How to Deal With Stress in Addiction Recovery
There are certain things you can count on as you go through life sober, and one of them is that you will feel stressed from time to time. Sooner or later things happen in life that challenge your feeling of serenity and leave you feeling overwhelmed and anxious. The question isn’t if you will experience …
The Power of Acceptance in Addiction Recovery
Wouldn’t it be great if you got exactly what you wanted all the time? In a perfect world, the people around you would act the way you wanted them to act and they would say what you wanted them to say. You could work when you wanted to work at a job you totally loved, …
Morning Yoga Routine: A Tool for Recovery
This is the first in a two-part series. In many addiction recovery programs, regular physical exercise is considered to be a top line behavior. Extensive research in exercise physiology demonstrates that exercise helps alleviate stress, increases a sense of well-being and boosts self-confidence. In recent years, addiction treatment centers, addiction therapists and addiction experts have …