Tips to Sort Your Daily Life in Addiction Recovery

When an addict comes back home from the addiction treatment center, getting life back together seems a bit tough for sure. Thus, you need to sort your daily life during addiction recovery. Here are some ways to help put order back into your life recommended by Brooks Healing Center.

Divide Up Your Day

An easy method involves carving your day into 1-hour blocks of time. How does this work? From the moment you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed, allocate your day’s activities. If exercising takes 1 hour, put that down at a certain time each day. Give yourself an hour each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you regularly check emails throughout the day, try scheduling 1 hour early in the day to read through and respond to all your emails, rather than waste time constantly going back and forth. Do the same thing for making and returning phone calls. Schedule a time to get this out of the way.

Running errands, going to a counseling session or group meeting, doing work or tasks around the house, going out to a movie, or engaging in other recreational activities? All can be accommodated in the daily scheduling. If you need time each day for introspection or planning for the future, setting aside time to do that will help you to focus.

If your task is finished before the block of time you’ve allocated, then you have free time. Take a break, go for a walk, daydream or make plans. Don’t worry if this seems a little strange, to begin with. You’ll soon find that you’re pretty good at figuring out how long it takes to accomplish routine tasks. What’s even better is that you will be amazed at how liberating it is to know that you will be able to get things done that are “on your list” without worrying that you’ll forget them.

Attend 12-Step Group Meetings

Many newcomers to addiction recovery and 12-step group attendance wonder how long they will have to attend. There is no right answer to this question. The fact is that after you attend meetings for about a year, you should continue to attend them for as long as you feel that you are getting something out of them. Many individuals continue to go to meetings for years or even decades after they have been successful in their recovery journey. They have built a community for themselves that keeps them on track.

At some point, however, when you feel that you are fully grounded in your recovery principles and have completed all your 12 steps, you may wish to give back. At this point in your recovery, you may wish to or are asked to become a sponsor. You may find yourself leading meetings, organizing workshops, helping out in job fairs, or providing other services unique to your background and capabilities. You may even wind up starting your own meeting in an area that desperately needs one. Some individuals with years of recovery go on to study and become alcohol and drug abuse counselors. Others write books on their personal recovery in order to help others.