Getting clean from drugs and alcohol can be challenging, but the rewards of sobriety are worth the effort. Achieving recovery involves more than just altering a single behavior. It is often a completely life-changing experience that shapes your mood, health, and social life.
Here are eight key changes to expect after getting clean from drugs and alcohol and beginning your new life of sobriety.
1. Improvement in Sobriety’s Temporary Challenges
It’s important to first recognize that getting clean isn’t easy. But as you build more tools to stay sober and find the support you need, it will become easier to maintain your sobriety.
When people first get sober, they often experience a number of mental health symptoms that are directly connected to their substance use disorder. These symptoms could include:
- Intense physical withdrawals
- Invasive drug and alcohol cravings
- Struggling with motivation
- Difficulty experiencing positive emotions
- Feeling sad, depressed, fearful, or anxious
As difficult as these experiences can be, they are inherently temporary in nature. For example, physical withdrawal typically ends within days or weeks. Cravings can last much longer, but grow less frequent and intensive with each passing day. Even mental health symptoms improve the longer you stay sober and the more time you give your brain to recover.
Remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Getting clean is just the first step, while achieving recovery is an ongoing process of improving your mental health and well-being for the rest of your life.
2. Unexpected Free Time
When people are in the midst of a substance use disorder, they often spend inordinate amounts of time seeking out their substance of choice, using that substance, and recovering from its effects. Getting clean means all of that time is now free and available, which can often lead to periods of idleness or boredom that can be triggers for returning to substance use.
In addiction treatment, most of this time is accounted for. Residential programs offer several hours of therapy and treatment each day, complemented by experiential therapies or opportunities for recreation to keep people busy, entertained, and active.
Similarly, intensive outpatient programs have several hours of treatment and services to help people focus on their recovery and see improvements in their mental health. This could include individual therapy sessions, peer-to-peer support groups, or meetings with a psychiatrist for medication management.
Yet when people return home from treatment, they often find that they don’t know what to do with their time. This is an often overlooked aspect of the recovery process, as boredom can lead to cravings and restlessness that make maintaining your sobriety more of a challenge than it needs to be.
Finding ways to fill this empty time is of paramount importance for staying sober. There is an abundance of healthy ways people can keep themselves occupied, including:
- Starting an exercise routine
- Going to self-help support groups
- Taking up a new hobby
- Socializing with friends and family members
- Enrolling in school
If you’ve started your recovery in an addiction treatment program, continuing the routines that you started in treatment can be a great way to stave off boredom or idleness as well.
3. Changing Social Circles
Humans are inherently social creatures, and your social circle can have a substantial impact on how easy or difficult it is to maintain your sobriety. While many people enter treatment with the notion of keeping the same circle of friends that they had when they were in active addiction, that often isn’t the most conducive approach to long-term sobriety.
This isn’t to say that you need to isolate yourself from friends and family members entirely, but it’s important to develop a strong social support network for recovery. This means spending time with people who understand the challenges of getting and staying sober, who can support you when you face challenges, and who encourage living a sober lifestyle.
Creating this new social circle isn’t always easy. However, there are a few simple tips that can help you develop a supportive recovery network:
- Attending self-help support groups
- Keeping in contact with friends you made in treatment
- Identifying friends or family members who support you in your recovery
- Meeting people at sober events
Developing just a few close social connections with other people in recovery can be an incredible resource for staying sober and make getting clean and staying clean much easier.
4. Pushback From Friends or Family Members
Many of your friends or family members may not understand recovery or the work it takes to stay sober. Addiction is a complex issue, but there are still pervasive beliefs and stigma that lead people to believe it’s just a matter of willpower, that addiction is a choice, or that addiction is only temporary.
As a result, it is common for people who have just graduated from addiction treatment to hear friends and family members make comments such as:
- “So you don’t have an addiction problem anymore, right?”
- “You were addicted to painkillers, so having one drink shouldn’t hurt.”
- “Can’t you smoke marijuana and still stay clean?”
- “Do you still have to go to those meetings?”
All of these comments can be triggering for substance use and may cause you to doubt your convictions for recovery. Of course, changing the behaviors of others is often an impossibility, but there are a few things you can do to prepare yourself ahead of time.
First, recognize that these types of pushback can happen. When you understand that you may face these types of questions or pressures from loved ones, you can prepare yourself ahead of time for how to deal with them.
Second, make a plan for how to answer these questions and deal with any triggers or cravings they may bring up. This could include setting boundaries with friends and loved ones about your recovery, or having a supportive friend or family member with you in situations where you think this may happen.
Like so many aspects of recovery, this type of pushback is often the most difficult to deal with in early recovery. When you get more sobriety time under your belt and become more confident in your recovery, this pushback can begin to affect you less and less.
5. Changes in Appearance
Addictive substances can have a number of negative effects on your physical appearance. While each substance affects your appearance differently, it’s common for people who are getting clean to start seeing improvements in their physical appearance, such as:
- Clearer skin and complexion
- Brighter eyes
- Stronger and healthier hair
- Weight stabilization
- Improved dental health
- Reduced puffiness and bloating
Some of these improvements in physical appearance can happen almost immediately, while others will continue to improve as you accumulate more time sober.
6. Better Physical Health
Drugs and alcohol of all types can have devastating effects on your physical health. Frequent health challenges that people face during addiction include:
- Liver disease
- Accidental injury
- Skin sores
- Respiratory problems
- Digestive problems
- Muscle loss
Getting clean helps stop the damage you’re doing to your body from substance use, as well as start you on the path to long-term physical recovery.
These improvements in physical health can be further enhanced by starting a regular exercise routine, which is one of the best lifestyle changes you can make during your recovery. Exercise can help you improve your physical health, help manage cravings, and provide you with an outlet for restless energy that keeps you moving toward your recovery goals.
7. New Ways of Coping
One of the most common challenges for people new to recovery is not having effective coping mechanisms for everyday challenges. The simple fact for many people is that they’ve used substances to cope with their problems for years and have let more natural and healthy coping skills slip by the wayside.
Going to addiction treatment or working with an in-person or virtual therapist can help you learn new and healthier ways of coping. Yet putting these skills into practice is the true test of improving your mental health — and after getting clean, you’ll need to learn and implement these coping mechanisms to build a lasting and stable recovery.
When learning new ways of coping, think about what the major challenges in your life are, as well as the healthy ways you can manage them. If you struggle with interpersonal conflict, learning healthier communication skills might be your best coping strategy. If you struggle with anxiety, learning grounding techniques or mindfulness can help you to rein in your symptoms.
This isn’t just a matter of staying sober. Learning these new coping styles is a skill for ensuring you live a healthy, productive, and less stressful life, which can make maintaining your recovery much easier.
8. Positive Mental Health Outcomes
Substance use disorders and mental health challenges often go hand in hand. It’s common for people new to recovery to experience co-occurring mental health conditions such as:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
- Bipolar disorder
In many such cases, these mental health conditions are actually caused by substance use itself. Mental health professionals label this as a substance-induced mental illness, which typically improves dramatically once people have achieved stable sobriety and recovery.
For others, sobriety alone isn’t enough to recover from a mental health condition. Ideally, people who are seeking treatment find dual-diagnosis treatment options, which can treat both mental health disorders and substance use disorders simultaneously.
Alternatively, there are those in recovery who do not have a diagnosable mental health condition but still have mental health struggles. These struggles often appear when people achieve sobriety for the first time, as drugs and alcohol can mask mental health challenges while under the influence.
But if you continue putting in diligent effort toward your recovery, you can see substantial improvement in mental health outcomes. Time and time again, research has shown that people who achieve recovery experience better mood regulation, improved senses of well-being, fewer mental health symptoms, and a host of other holistic improvements.
Of course, if you’re not seeing the improvement in your mental health that you’d like, you can always sign up to meet with a trained therapist to discuss your mental health challenges. Working with a therapist can help accelerate the mental health improvements you see and keep you feeling your best in recovery.
Call APN Lodge for Sobriety Support Today
Getting clean is just the first step of the recovery process. Building a healthier and productive life in recovery is where you will find the most reward.
If you or a loved one is struggling to take these critical steps toward recovery, the team at APN Lodge can help you determine the source of your challenges, guide you toward the treatment options that best fit your needs, and support you every step of the way as you navigate the future. Contact us today by filling out our confidential contact form or calling us at 855.934.1178 to learn more.
References
- Arpin, Sarah N., et al. “Having Friends and Feeling Lonely.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215569722. Accessed 3 Nov. 2024.
- Canver BR, Newman RK, Gomez AE. Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome. [Updated 2024 Feb 14]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441882/
