A relapse prevention plan is one of the best tools you can use to maintain your sobriety. It can provide you with insight into what your specific triggers are, what coping mechanisms you have available to resist cravings or temptation, and how to set goals for yourself to build a happier and healthier life in recovery.
Daily practices that support you in resisting relapse are a critical component of this plan. Even simple practices that take only minutes out of your day can have an immense positive effect, making the process of recovery much easier to maintain.
The Importance of a Relapse Prevention Plan
When starting your recovery, a relapse prevention plan provides a consistent structure for how you’ll maintain your recovery for years to come. Typically, these plans are created during a comprehensive relapse prevention program — a common and evidence-based approach used in modern addiction treatment centers.
Relapse prevention plans have several key elements to help you achieve this goal. Some of the most important aspects include:
- Identifying Your Triggers: By identifying the people, places, or things that spark a craving for substance use, you can learn to avoid or prepare for them
- Healthy Coping Mechanisms: A relapse prevention plan outlines what coping mechanisms are available to you and when to use them in your recovery
- Building Awareness: Learning to recognize the patterns of thought or behavior that often lead to relapse can help you notice the warning signs ahead of time
- Creating Recovery Goals: Making a plan for long and short-term goals in your relapse prevention plan gives you a sense of purpose and something to strive for
- Cultivating Daily Habits: The routines you go through day to day can help you resist relapse if cultivated correctly
A relapse prevention plan alone typically isn’t enough for people to break free from addiction. Still, it is an incredibly useful tool for people who have achieved sobriety and plan to maintain it.
Such a plan provides a structure for considering what challenges you may face in the future, steps to take during difficult situations, and preventive strategies to help keep you feeling your best.
Daily Practices to Resist Relapse
Daily practices are one of the most important components of the relapse prevention plan. When making a roadmap to maintaining your sobriety, only focusing on high-risk situations — such as going to a party where people are drinking or a friend offering you drugs — doesn’t account for the small but cumulative challenges that people face in recovery.
Maintaining your recovery isn’t just a matter of resisting drugs or alcohol. It’s about living a healthy and happy life without substances. When you’re happy, content, and confident, your risk of relapse is substantially lower than if you’re bored, sad, or insecure.
Daily practices to resist relapse are designed to help you cultivate these positive emotions, keep your mental, physical, and emotional health in shape, and place you in a position where returning to drug or alcohol use is the last thing on your mind.
Some of the best daily practices you can incorporate to cultivate this state include:
Talking to Other People in Recovery
Social support is one of the strongest defenses against drug and alcohol use, and your recovery support network is one of the best places to find it. Talking to other people in recovery can help remind you of the challenges you were facing during a substance use disorder, how far you’ve come, and what you need to do to stay vigilant against the risk of relapse.
If you stray too far from people in recovery and only surround yourself with people who don’t understand what breaking free from a substance use disorder is like, you may find yourself questioning whether you really need to stay sober to begin with. People who don’t understand addiction and recovery may pressure you with questions such as:
- “You used to have a problem, but you don’t anymore, right? Why don’t you just have one drink?”
- “Do you think you were really addicted? If you were able to get sober, it couldn’t have been that bad.”
- “You had a heroin problem, not a weed problem. Why can’t you smoke?”
Often, statements like these are said with the best of intentions. All the same, they can lead to you doubting your commitment to sobriety, tempting you to return to substance use and lose track of what you had to overcome to reach sobriety in the first place.
Talking with other people in recovery can keep you grounded and provide the social support needed to maintain your recovery. The right people can remind you that recovery is a positive journey and that your practices to stay sober are worth the effort.
Starting a Mindfulness Practice
Mindfulness practices can keep you grounded in the present moment and prepare you for handling cravings or stress when they happen. To understand how mindfulness practices work, it’s important to first learn what mindfulness itself means and how it can help.
Mindfulness is a state of consciousness. It’s typically described as an experience of being entirely centered in the present moment, without stressing about the future or worrying about the past. But like other states of consciousness — such as sleep, alertness, or daydreaming — it’s not necessarily something you can enter into easily or teach someone to do directly.
Mindfulness practices serve to help make this state of consciousness more accessible. Common examples of these practices include:
- Meditation
- Yoga
- Breathing exercises
- Body scans
- Mindful eating
These practices help center your mind on the present moment, teach you to avoid flights of thought that run out of control, and connect with your physical experiences rather than mental experiences. With practice, you can achieve the state of mindfulness, which becomes easier to tap into the more you experience it.
Gaining this ability to tap into mindfulness at any moment can be incredibly beneficial for your recovery. For example, experiencing a craving can be countered by adopting a mindful state and recognizing the experience without feeling the need to act on it. Stressful situations can also be reduced overall by connecting to the present moment.
All of these reasons are why mindfulness has quickly become one of the most popular and effective methods for treating substance use disorders. Try incorporating a mindfulness practice into your daily routine, even for just five to ten minutes a day, and see if the experience helps improve your overall mental health.
Creating Exercise Routines
Maintaining a healthy exercise routine can keep you feeling your best, both physically and mentally. When you stay active, you can prevent mental health symptoms such as:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Boredom
- Mood dysregulation
Research has shown that living an active lifestyle can be directly protective against the risk of relapse. By improving your mood, providing an enjoyable outlet for your free time, and preventing physical health problems, an exercise routine plays an important role in your full relapse prevention plan.
For many people, this means going to the gym, but there are many exercise options that you can incorporate into your daily routine. Some popular options include:
- Cycling
- Walking
- Swimming
- Running
- Hiking
- Mountain biking
- Surfboarding
- Skiing
- Kayaking
- Stand-up paddleboarding
Even just walking around your neighborhood can have positive health effects, particularly if you live a more sedentary lifestyle. Try to incorporate at least 30 minutes of physical activity into your daily routine, and you’ll start seeing the dividends of this work in your emotional and mental well-being.
Practicing Healthy Eating
Prioritizing nutrition during your recovery can help prevent you from experiencing unwanted side effects in your physical health that can drain your mood if left unchecked. Even hunger itself can be a trigger for substance use, so it’s important to stay on top of your daily nutritional needs to make maintaining your recovery as simple as possible.
Try these few simple tips to make sure you’re meeting your nutritional needs:
- Eat a wide variety of food
- Emphasize plants and fruits in your diet
- Avoid ultra-processed foods
- Eat three meals a day
- Remember to hydrate according to your needs
Especially in early recovery, you will want to avoid intense diet regimens or overly restrictive nutrition plans that can leave you feeling hungry, cranky, and generally not your best.
Prioritizing Your Sleep
Just as hunger can be a trigger for substance use, so can feeling excessively tired or groggy. A healthy sleep schedule helps support your ability to manage stress, maintain your focus and motivation, and allow your muscles to recover.
A few simple tips can help with prioritizing your sleep. First, try to keep a regular sleep schedule. Waking up every day at the same time and going to bed at the same time every night can make it easier for you to fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling rested.
Most adults need seven to nine hours of quality sleep each night. When making a sleep schedule, try to set your sleep and wake hours to accommodate this timeframe.
Second, avoid activities late at night that are overly stimulating. This includes watching television right before bed, scrolling social media, or exercising vigorously. Instead, you’ll want to spend 30 to 45 minutes before bed dedicated to winding down and engaging in relaxing activities such as yoga, meditation, or light reading.
Finally, try to cut down on caffeine intake, especially in the afternoon. Drinking a caffeinated beverage later in the afternoon can disrupt your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. In fact, cutting off caffeine after about 2 p.m. can make a dramatic difference in your overall sleep quality.
Reading “Quit Lit”
“Quit Lit” is literature dedicated to helping people break free from addiction challenges. The genre offers a wide variety of different storytelling techniques to help people in their recovery journey, including:
- Sharing personal stories of recovery
- Exploring the science of substance use disorders
- Providing self-help support and guidance
- Teaching people how to enjoy life in recovery
Quit lit can be a great way of connecting to the work of recovery on a personal level. Picking up a book about how someone else overcame their challenges can inspire you to overcome your own, and learning more about the science of addiction can help you make evidence-based decisions for supporting your own recovery.
Get Professional Support from APN Today
A comprehensive relapse prevention plan can go a long way toward helping you maintain your recovery. If you’re struggling to stay sober or need guidance in creating your recovery plan, you can access a comprehensive range of support options personalized to your unique journey by reaching out to a mental health expert.
Ready to take your next step toward recovery? Connect with APN by calling 855-934-1178, using our online contact form, or by sending us a message via the live chat function on our website today.
References
- Witkiewitz, Katie et al. “Mindfulness-based relapse prevention for substance craving.” Addictive behaviors vol. 38,2 (2013): 1563-1571. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2012.04.001
