The first few weeks of recovery may seem fraught with anxiety, a few sleepless nights, some depression, and more than a little uncertainty. Recovering addicts have to learn how to pace themselves, begin to put the coping skills and strategies they learned during treatment into practice, and get into the swing of a new – and clean – lifestyle. All that sounds great and makes sense, you might say – on paper. But if you’re new to recovery, you are probably wondering just how you can possibly get through today, let alone tomorrow.

There are strategies that you can employ to help you get through the early days of recovery. Some are fairly basic, while others involve a little more time and effort. Think of the following as suggestions that you can choose to use – if they work for you. When you find something that really helps you, by all means continue to do it. After all, the important point is that you make progress during this time of transition from active treatment to your new life of sobriety in recovery. Every day you’re clean is a big step toward achieving healthy balance in your life.

Start With a Good Breakfast

You’ve most likely heard the advice to eat a good breakfast each morning without giving much thought to why. There’s actually a lot of medical knowledge behind the recommendation, which turns out to be quite sound. We’re talking about fueling your body with nutritious food to jumpstart your day. You don’t need to eat a 3- to 5-course breakfast in order to eat right. Just be sure that you eat a good, balanced meal – and do it every day.

No more grabbing a quick coffee and Danish. Forget about the super-sized bagel and cream cheese. Add whole grain or whole wheat bread (lightly toasted, maybe with a dollop of sugar-free jam or Smart Balance margarine) to a couple of scrambled eggs, an egg-white omelet with red, green, yellow, or orange peppers, onions, and maybe a link or two of light turkey sausage. Drink fresh orange juice or vegetable juice (or juice your own – even better). Take a multi-vitamin or supplements as recommended by your physician and your treating therapists. A half-grapefruit is another excellent choice (along with that one piece of wheat toast) for breakfast. Okay, have your coffee, if you must, but use fat-free milk (no cream or half and half), and no real sugar.
There are other variations on a healthy breakfast that you can use, including whole grain pancakes and light syrup, a fresh fruit bowl and fat-free yogurt, granola or whole wheat cereal with a sliced banana and maybe a bit of fresh fruit (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc.). For even more variety, buy a good cookbook and start experimenting.

The idea is to keep breakfast on your daily schedule, and keep the menu varied and interesting. In no time, you’ll start looking forward to breakfast. This is a great way to start your day in recovery on a positive note. When you’re satisfied from eating a good meal first thing in the morning, you have more energy and enthusiasm to tackle the challenges and opportunities each day in early recovery will bring your way.

Add in Daily Exercise

Now that you’ve fortified yourself with breakfast, it’s time to do something about getting your cardiovascular and other systems working in your body. That means doing a little exercise. We’re not talking about running a marathon or doing a strenuous 3-hour workout at some high-priced gym, just getting things moving in a nice, easy pace. You can build up your strength, alter and lengthen your routine, as you go along.

For starters, always begin any exercise session – even walking – with some stretches. This helps limber up your body and work out any kinks that have tightened up your muscles while you were sleeping (or from the previous day’s exercise, stresses or worries). There are many easy-to-follow exercise books that show simple stretches, and you can also find them on the Internet, and in the week-end magazine sections of the newspaper. Stretching doesn’t take that long and it prepares your body to work those muscles a bit more. Think of stretching as the warm-up before you head out. If you plan on going for a 20- to 30-minute walk in the neighborhood or a park or nature trail, for example, and you don’t do your warm-up stretches, you’re asking for plenty of sore muscles in the next day or two.

Speaking of that daily walk, it can be a hike up a mountain trail, traipsing along the sandy beach, or whatever. It is always nice to add different scenery to your walk, so having a few trails or locations to go to will really help keep your interest. Again, the idea is to do this regularly, say 3 to 5 days a week.

As you get stronger and have more endurance (heart, lungs, etc.), you can add in more strenuous forms of exercise. This may include mountain biking, cycling, swimming, or competitive sport games such as basketball, volleyball, tennis, ice hockey, or outdoor recreational activities such as cross-country or downhill skiing.

What’s so great about exercise and early recovery? When you exercise, your body produces the natural feel-good chemicals called endorphins. The release of endorphins is like a flood of warmth. You feel good, and the reward pathways recognize this feeling. The best news is that this is a natural process – and non-addictive, unlike some of the other substances you used to use to feel good. So, add exercise to your daily routine, and keep it going.

Make a Schedule – and Stick to It

Rather than leave things to chance – and the likelihood of idle time when your thoughts could turn to cravings and urges – it’s a good idea to make out a daily schedule. This is especially important in early recovery, when you’re still fresh out of treatment and not quite ready for everything that might come your way. Having a schedule that you can look at, cross things off when they’re done, and a roadmap for what to do next in the day can really benefit. Before you reject this out of hand as too regimental or restrictive, think about what a schedule helps you accomplish. First, having a schedule, or daily agenda, can help keep you on-track with projects and tasks that you need to attend to. In business, projects don’t get done if someone doesn’t have a to-do list, or a project leader keeps after those in the task group to stay on schedule. It’s a lot like that, except we’re applying this to recovery.

When you were in treatment, you had a schedule. Whether you were in residential or outpatient treatment, there were times scheduled for counseling – individual or group – times for lectures and educational readings, free time, homework, and the like. So, you’re familiar with knowing what you need to do when. Now that you’re in recovery, while you don’t have the benefit of someone to remind you it’s time for group, or time to see your therapist, you can employ scheduling to your advantage.
Break up your day into one-hour time blocks. Put down the time you get up, when you eat breakfast, do exercise, bathe and groom, go to work, do errands, watch TV, go out to a movie, or pursue other intellectual (going to school, taking a class), recreational or entertainment/leisure activities. Also put down the time you go to sleep. Try to keep to a regular wake-up/retire to bed schedule. This helps get your body rhythms in sync. What happens if you toss and turn, have a restless or fitful sleep, or are plagued by nightmares, anxiety attacks, cravings or urges that get you up? If you can’t sleep, don’t toss around in the bed. Get up and go into another room and do something to occupy your mind until you are again sleepy. You can read or watch TV, but don’t eat anything, as this will prevent you from being able to go to sleep. When you feel sleepy, return to bed and go to sleep.

If you are suffering a panic or anxiety attack, or feel that your urges and cravings are getting out of hand, call your 12-step sponsor or physician, whomever you can reach. If your physician has prescribed antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication, or medication to help curb cravings and urges, take it as appropriate. During your next session or meeting with him or your therapist (if you have continuing care or aftercare as part of your overall treatment program), discuss your sleeplessness and emotional turmoil, cravings and urges. You will then be able to work out some different coping mechanisms that may help you better weather these discomforting times.

One thing about schedules is that you can always change them. As you get more accustomed to doing things every day – eating meals at regular times, rising and going to bed at the same time every day, regular exercise – you’ll be able to block out those hour-long chunks without any difficulty. It’s not the regular routine that will get to you. It’s those unscheduled empty hours that will work at your mind and allow temptation to creep in. That’s what you will try to prevent by making out your daily schedule.

Of course, your day (and evening) isn’t all about work, eating, exercise and sleeping. You need to factor in play time. It’s important that you have time to do what makes you happy, gives you a lift, things that you enjoy.

As you progress further in your recovery, after 6 months or so, your daily routine will become more or less automatic. Try not to jam up your schedule with too many tasks, or projects that may demand too much of you in terms of time or effort. If you bite off more than you can reasonably chew, the tendency will be to back off or abandon it. That will result in disappointment and a feeling of failure. Remember, you don’t have to be superman or superwoman. You just need to go at your own pace. If things get too hectic or threaten to overwhelm you, slow it down. Pace yourself. You’re not in a race. You’re in recovery, and that takes time.

Make Time to Dream

Many addicts in early recovery think that life ahead is just a series of boring, tedious days filled with avoiding people, places and things they used to find pleasurable. Instead of looking forward, they spend their time looking backward. This is a quick and nearly surefire route to relapse.

Naturally, you can’t stop your mind from thinking about partying with old drinking buddies, or how much fun you remember having when you were anticipating the big jackpot at the casino, or using and drinking simultaneously – or whatever your drug or addictive behavior of choice was. It isn’t the thinking that’s the problem. It’s how you take responsibility and what you do about it that makes all the difference.

Assuming that you have accumulated a toolkit of coping skills and strategies to use, make sure to use them. These will help you to greatly reduce the outside temptations to “just have one” or “be with the gang,” or try to resume your previous life as you once knew it.

One way to minimize the backward looks is to keep your focus firmly on the future. Think about what you may have always wanted to do but, for whatever reason, never got around to, felt you didn’t deserve it, didn’t have the time or energy to pursue. In other words, take out your list of dreams, dust it off, and give it a good look-see. Don’t say you never had a dream. Everybody has a dream. For some, the dream looked like an accumulation of wealth, or a perfect family, or adventure travel – whatever. For others, a long-put-off dream may have included getting a degree, or finishing one, having children, participating in a marathon, learning a new language.

Write down what strikes you now that you’d like to do – all things considered – in one year’s time, 5 to 10 years ahead. Next, write down what steps you need to take to help make the particular dream a reality. This is a double-duty process. It involves making a list of goals, and it also involves dreaming of the achievements you’d like to accomplish.

In any case, it involves forward thinking. It is progress, and it will help ease you through some days that may be frustrating, difficult, or agonizingly slow. On the days when you are making great strides, checking off things on your daily schedule or getting to the next level on your list of short-term or long-term goals, your dreams can begin to morph and change as you find new opportunities on your horizon.

Be Optimistic – But Grounded in Reality

Use your time in early recovery wisely. Adopt a mindset that is both optimistic about your future and grounded in the reality that you are in early recovery. What this means is that you have every expectation that you will do well, since you have the necessary tools at your disposal, as well as the realization that not every day will be a stellar one. There will be good days and days that are pretty frightful. You may question if you have the resolve, or the determination, to keep going. You do. And you have help available if you feel yourself about to slip.

A slip is what Alcoholics Anonymous calls when someone falls into relapse. A slip only means that you may not have paid enough attention to your coping skills training, or you needed to practice it more. You may have an addiction and a genetic makeup that makes the cravings more difficult to overcome. For this, certain medication may be helpful. The point of taking medication to handle cravings and urges is to get you to the point where you can handle your stresses and cravings without resorting to using. You may need additional therapy or counseling. You definitely should continue to participate in regular 12-step group meetings – especially for the first year of your recovery.

Why is it important to go to 12-step meetings? You are in the company of others who have undergone similar experiences with addiction. If you are a woman, you should attend a meeting comprised of only women, if that’s available. Female addicts have different perspectives and needs than their male counterparts. It’s also less threatening for many women to discuss their fears, anxieties, problems or stresses in the company of other women than in mixed groups.

Give it Time

Finally, getting through the day in early recovery is all about time – adequate time. You didn’t become an addict overnight. It likely took years to get to the point where you either recognized that you were in trouble and sought help, or circumstances forced you into treatment (legal, family, vocational pressures). You can’t expect to miraculously be “over it.” In fact, you already know that you are an addict and will be an addict from now on. But addiction doesn’t define you. It is something you deal with, but it doesn’t need to control you. You are the architect of your own destiny. Granted, you need help, support and encouragement from others, and may need it for quite some time, depending on your type of addition, how long you were addicted, physical, environmental, and other factors.

Recovering addicts who’ve been clean and sober for several years acknowledge that they felt stronger over time, stronger than they ever felt possible. They’ll also be the first to tell you that cravings and urges can reappear even years after they’ve been clean and sober. But, with the help and support of their fellow 12-step group members, family and friends, they are better able to withstand such pressures. They will, in fact, be among your most stalwart and reliable allies in your own recovery. And every 12-step group has them.

One day, in the not-too-distant future, you may be able to provide encouragement and support for someone else who is new to recovery – just as you are new to it now. You will be able to impart to them the tips and techniques that helped you get through the day in early recovery and beyond. That’s what successful recovery is: seeing past today and looking forward to a healthy tomorrow – and sharing your accumulated wisdom with others.
 

You used to be the life of the party, and even though you knew it was actually destroying your life, some of your friends aren’t too happy with the new you.  Some of your friends, maybe even a girlfriend or boyfriend, kind of liked you that way. Maybe you were a happy drunk, and now you seem to serious for their tastes. What’s a newly sober person to do?

The pat answer is: find new friends. Actually it’s not a bad answer, because fair-weather friends will likely not be there for you when you most need them. But it doesn’t help if you are feeling lonely and rejected to hear such an answer.

It’s important to remember that as a drinking alcoholic you had a persona – some people may have been attracted to that persona.  But that doesn’t mean you are no longer fun – just that you are in a development phase in your life. If you were drinking heavily for many years, even you might not know exactly who you are anymore.

Early sobriety is like a visit to a foreign country – you are not only getting to know yourself, but you are probably going to discover the type of people you really like. You may have hung out with certain people because they accepted your alcoholic drinking. Some people may have liked you – or even dated you – because they found you easy to manipulate.  Maybe you were the type who when really sauced like to pick up the check for the table.  Now you’re sober, and you’re thinking more responsibly about your money. You aren’t trying to play the big spender anymore.

Whatever your behavior was when you were drinking, if you are really working toward a positive recovery it is unlikely that you will have all the same friends you had before. This can be sad, even lonely at first, but it does not mean your future will be lonely. Chances are you will develop more meaningful and lasting relationships when alcohol is not fueling your emotions.  You will be a better friend, ergo, you will find better friends.

The other complaint a lot of people in early sobriety have is that all your friends are big drinkers. No surprise there – when we’re drinking too much it’s a lot easier to feel comfortable if we’re with other people who drink too much, even people who drink more than we do.  It is not worth risking your sobriety to try to hang out with those who drink the way you drank. Peers can be the strongest influence on our choices, both good and bad.

In early sobriety the goal is to take stock of your life (inventory) and re-discover who you really are: your values, your desires, your goals. Sometimes that means a few friends have to fall by the wayside.

Everyone knows the saying about trying to keep up with the Jones’es.  Perfect introduction to a post about the dangers of comparing your progress to others’ – but also to chat about when this might actually be a good thing.

In the past, my idea of comparing was to look for anything I was missing that someone else had – I would conveniently ignore the things I had that they didn’t. This allowed me to never measure up and resulted in a lot of very boring self-pity.

Comparing has inherent risks, especiallly if you have the tendency to focus on the glass as half empty rather than half full.  However, in some cases, comparing can be good.  For example, if there is an area in your life you would like to improve, you might look at someone you admire and compare what they have done to achieve their goals to how you have attempted to achieve them. This can be a positive exercise, especially if you ask them, what did you do to achieve that?

It’s important to always remember that success if not measured by things. This is when we get into comparing someone’s success to ours in sobriety. Like we might look at someone 5 years sober who just got their dream job, then we say, well I’m 10 years sober and I don’t have my dream job yet!  Maybe your career requires more time. Maybe you created more wreckage in the past. Or, in some cases, maybe that person can give you some helpful advice.

Comparing is only healthy when it is used as a learning tool – not as a way to beat yourself up.  And remember, what someone looks like on the outside may not match what is on the inside. I remember thinking about a particular person – man they are so successful at what I want to be doing; why aren’t I successful at it too?  That person drank again and lost everything.

I missed posting on my anniversary/birthday of 23 years. I have been moving and it has been a huge job!  Moving can be exhilirating and frustrating, it can be a happy event but is also tinged with sadness. I’ve always had to have at least one good cry when moving. I think part of it is shedding the past – it’s a mourning process of sorts. It’s a way to let go of the garbage that still drags me into negative thinking. It’s a way to get a clean slate once again and renew my commitment to a healthy, positive life.

Twenty three years ago I didn’t think I could live even one day without alcohol. One day at  a time I was able to go a day without alcohol over 8400 days. Not alone, mind you, but I did commit myself to the steps needed to achieve this daily goal. Apparently the steps work! (Big Grin).

If you are in early sobriety and feel like maybe it’s not worth it – let me assure you IT IS WELL WORTH IT.

I remember my first year – I was depressed, anxious, lonely…even with new friends, lots of meetings. My mind, body, and soul were a step behind.  I remember the day – almost exactly at one year – that I had that epiphany.

Two friends I started out with had planned a 1-year anniversary trip. They excluded me “because you are too negative.” I was devastated. Those two friends drank that weekend. Maybe that’s why they wanted to exclude me- I’m not sure.  But I didn’t drink that weekend and I am forever grateful for whatever in the universe protected me from that path.

The epiphany came as I was walking in NYC (where I lived in my first five years) and I suddenly realized I was hanging on to those negative feelings – and that I could choose to find the positive. A sudden wave of overwhelming joy washed over me. It was an indescribable feeling, and one I have not felt at quite the same intensity since – but it was enough to wake me up to a truly positive path in recovery.

Congratulations to everyone out there who stayed sober today. Today is the day. It’s the only day. Make good choices today and you can move forward to the next today sober and sane.

Family gatherings, holiday parties, bbqs with ice chests full of forbidden beverages…sometimes, especially in early sobriety, you just wish there would be some kind of moratorium on holidays.   My experience with these events is that they are stressful because they are often forced family events.  I know in my case, my family was something to be reckoned with and early on in sobriety I simply didn’t have the confidence or the skills to really handle them without ending up a basket case.

I started to change how I dealt with these obligations.  First thing I did was change my mindset: these events might be obligatory, but there is no point in me meeting an obligation if it threatens my sobriety.  People might be upset, but over time, as they see your life get better, they will be more forgiving.  If they aren’t, oh well – you aren’t good to anyone if you do something that puts your sobriety at risk.

One of my challenges was that I had two ways of dealing with things: confrontation or stewing. There was no in-between.  These family gatherings really forced me to look at how I handled conflict and learn how to handle it more gracefully.  The first part of that is forgetting the idea that somehow as you get better your family will too.  No such luck.

While it might seem like a cliche the truth is: you can only control your behavior. So don’t spend a lot of energy trying to get your family to treat you differently. Instead, what I did was set boundaries that I knew were critical to my sobriety. Then, without judgment or hostility, as kindly as I could, I enforced those boundaries.  I understood that no matter how delicately I handled this I might hurt someone’s feelings, but as long as I was kind and not just trying to shove my family’s character defects down their throats, I pushed through and did what I needed to do.

I remember being home for a holiday one year – this was always a challenge because it meant an expensive plane ticket and my finances weren’t that great in early sobriety. When I got home it was the usual. I thought I was strong enough, but it became clear that the relentless criticism and disapproval was really dragging me down. I was crying myself to sleep at night.  I explained how I felt – and what I needed – which was met with the customary, “Get over yourself.” Now when you’ve been hearing that since you were five years old, it is pretty painful.

I decided to move my return ticket up. I did it first, before explaining what I did, because I knew this was what I needed to do.  When I told my mother she was furious. I very calmly explained to her: I’m in a huge transition right now. Maybe you think I’m being a baby, and maybe I am being a baby, but the truth is this is what I need to do right now. It isn’t about you at all – it’s about what I can handle and not handle right now.

She let it go after a few hours – and I think it helped to tell her it wasn’t about her. Parents can be so defensive when you are in early recovery!  “Oh, I bet you’re telling that therapist how horrible we were and blaming it all on us!”

The truth is this: it wasn’t about her, because in reality, I could never and would never be able to change her perspective on life.  It was about me, because I wasn’t strong enough yet to accept her as she was.

A few good things came from this event.  In the future when I came home to visit my parents made a very real effort not to turn my week into a what’s-wrong-with-our-daughter marathon. Frankly, they really loved me and wanted to see me. And some part of them recognized that I wasn’t a child anymore who was captive to their verbal abuse. If they wanted a relationship with me it had to be mutually respectful.

Of course, this also meant changes on my part as well. Complex relationships are never a one-way street. I had to learn to be less sensitive and less defensive.  I had to have enough sense of self that I wasn’t devastated by every little off comment.  I’m not going to say this happened overnight, but certainly over the first five years of sobriety things got much better.