13 Fears About Sobriety That Will Sabotage Your Recovery
You will be ready to start your new, sober life. If you are struggling with alcohol or drug addiction, don’t let the fear of being sober and reclaiming your life stop you. Instead, work with our skilled team to learn how to overcome this pain for good. Many individuals facing drug and alcohol addiction have developed a lifestyle around their addiction. Everything they do – day in and day out – focuses on that next hit, drink, or high.
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This can relate to picking up the pieces after detox, but it also has to do with what you know and feel comfortable with in your daily life. A life of drugs and alcohol feels normal because that’s what you’ve focused on for so long. It’s not uncommon, then, to be afraid of what life will be like without these substances to help you to manage stress, family members and other challenges. Perhaps you’ve relapsed before, and now you’re worried it will happen again. You may feel as though failure is inevitable. In this situation, it’s important to be truthful with yourself.
Stop Being Afraid to Get Sober with Northpoint Recovery
Recover from addiction at home with medication, community, and support—from the nonjudmental experts who really care. While life in recovery can be challenging, it is infinitely better than staying stuck in the alternative. Whether you have one day sober or 10 years, recovery presents challenges. There are times when youll doubt yourself and get pushed outside of your comfort zone.
Reality Check
The fog lifts, the poor behavior stops, and people generally become happier and easier to be around. The mind clears, there is more peace, more clarity and a better ability to function. All of which are just some of the many reasons why being sober far outweighs being addicted to drugs or alcohol.
- Sobriety can be an incredible way to shed relationships you’ve outgrown as well as find new ones that align with your new values.
- So I just started going over there because I loved the music.
- You may also have difficulty making plans or learning new things.
- Most fears that we faced were about our relationships and how they’d change, how we’d cope, fear of failure, and the fear of change itself.
- However, if you don’t learn to manage those fears and put them into perspective, they will drive you right back to the bottle.
What Is Sobriety?
But seeking a professional opinion on where to get started can help alleviate and address your particular fears. Even after being in recovery for a while, you may not be delighted with the changes you have made.4 In fact you may realize you don’t like being sober. For with changes comes adjustments, which can be challenging. So it may take some time before you truly feel content in your new life. But the following insights may ease your journey and improve your outlook. Recognizing that fear is present is the first step in moving beyond it.
With that understood, you can begin to move forward with working towards recovery again. One thing I’ve learned in my seven and a half years in recovery is that we all have fear, and we all barbiturates: definition types uses side effects and abuse overcome those fears, instead choosing recovery. What I know from this side of the fence is that life in recovery gives us everything that we had looking for at the bottom of a bottle.
First, it’s important to educate yourself about sobriety. There are many myths about sobriety that can cause people to feel scared. However, the more you know about sobriety, the less scary it will seem. Any big life change naturally brings a sense of fear or unease.
It’s the whole, “You mean I can never drink ever again?! ” Let your brain marinate on words like forever, and you’ll set yourself right up for failure. The fear of getting sober is more common than we may think. Of course, on the surface, asking if there is such a thing as a all opiates detox might seem like a rhetorical question. Non-addicts may proclaim, “Of course addicts should want to get sober—why wouldn’t they? ” But the problem runs deeper than just simply being able to quit and stay sober.
As you work through the detox process, you can start to feel the overwhelming frustration and anxiety build around being sober. Post-detox, you may have a wide range of emotions flooding your mind. You’re likely also to start feeling the stress build, perhaps the same stress that leads you down the path to using. Fear of recovery not working and that you will return to use is real. In fact, for many of us returning to use is a reality of recovery. By its very nature, substance use disorder is referred to as a relapsing condition.
If you’re like most drinkers, you’ve likely surrounded yourself at some point with a group of people who also drink. I’d argue that many of us gravitated to a group of friends who have drinking habits that align with our own, and we did this because we didn’t want sober friends. The life I had before how long does a hangover last plus how to cure a hangover fast I quit drinking was a lot like Groundhog Day; I was always waiting for it to begin and always reliving the same stuff, day after day, year after year. When I finally walked away from booze at 34, my life opened up. I can honestly say sobriety is the best thing I have ever done for myself.
Without change, you won’t be able to achieve sobriety. Do you fear that your life will be boring and that people will turn away from you? You become a more vibrant and healthy person, and you will attract the people that support your lifestyle. In addition, you will find new hobbies and opportunities that will expose you to a wide variety of people. My biggest fears in life include being in large groups of strange people, standing at parties by myself, and really just people in general. Drunk me didn’t have to worry if I was alone at a party because drunk me didn’t abide such things.
Going from abusing drugs to living sober often involves major changes in your lifestyle. This can include moving in a new social circle, taking up new activities and leading a healthier lifestyle. Maybe you’re afraid you won’t be able to make new friends.
But when we no longer have those devices at our disposal, we’re left with only our minds, our willpower and our inner strength to carry us through the hard times. We’re forced to think and analyze our problems, to come up with solutions, and in doing so we may fail or make mistakes. But that’s how we grow and learn, and how we learn to cope better when the next challenge presents itself. Over time, our ability to cope and come up with solutions that work for us becomes easier and easier. Change can be scary, but it can also be gratifying. If you’re scared of becoming sober because you’re afraid of change, it’s important to remember that change is a necessary part of recovery.
However, others striving for or in sobriety may find themselves asking “Why is sobriety so hard? ” Lifestyle modifications can be uncomfortable and perhaps even generate anger and resentment. So for some people, sobriety can be a bit scary. And one day, my older brother, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, was staying with me and I said, “I’m just so isolated. I’m all used up.” And he said some sort of happy Christian horseshit. I adore him, but it was like a bumper sticker and I was just furious.