If you’re confused about navigating your sobriety journey, or maybe you don’t trust yourself enough yet, you may want to try the following tips. They’ll help to uncomplicate the stressful, and at times, difficult aspects of recovery. Grab a cup of coffee or tea if you haven’t already, get comfy, and get inspired.
FIND YOUR HEART CENTERED PURPOSE
Courage, like every other emotion, is fleeting. So, when you inevitably lose it, you’ll have nothing to fall back on if you’re relying on courage to keep you sober.
Instead, find your heart centered purpose to stay sober. Once you connect with why you want to stay sober, it will never leave. In the moments of weakness, come back to your purpose.
You can read this to find your purpose for sobriety. It explains the science of why you want to connect with your heart and how you can easily do it.
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TRY A PERSPECTIVE SHIFT
It’s easy to look at sobriety as a punishment because we’re now being confronted with the parts of ourselves we don’t know how to love. And that’s heavy and dark.
But, how many times have you begged and pleaded to get sober? And here you are now, sober. That’s not to say you asked for this so you have to deal with it. Why not try looking at sobriety from a different angle?
Sobriety isn’t a punishment. Sobriety is your answered prayer.
See how that small shift transforms your perspective? This is the chance you have been waiting for to transform yourself and your life. So, take full advantage of this. Enjoy this blessing.
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LISTEN TO YOURSELF
We can’t learn to trust ourselves if we’re constantly outsourcing our own internal wisdom. And I get it- you don’t want to make any mistakes. You want to do this the right way. Let the right way be to build a relationship with yourself, including trusting yourself enough to listen to yourself.
Take the time to sit with yourself and be your own voice of reason. It’s going to feel uncomfortable at first, like anything else in the beginning. But, with time, you will learn to value your own input.
CREATE RITUALS
Sobriety is stressful as it is, more so when you can’t help but fear that you’ll fall back into old toxic patterns and behaviors. That’s where creating rituals comes in. They train our brain and nervous system to feel safe while we create new comfort zones that are actually safe, instead of the unhealthy ones we fall back on when things get tough.
Anything can be a ritual. It also doesn’t have to be a long, elaborate drawn out routine. It can be something as simple as declaring that you’re going to have an amazing day when you first wake up, or savoring that first sip of coffee or tea, or expressing gratitude for something or someone. You can make it whatever you want it to be.
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TRY NEW THINGS
It’s kind of surprising how much of our time drinking took up. And when you get sober, you have all this free time you didn’t even know existed. Which makes now the perfect time to start something new, as a celebration of your new life.
Start the hobby you’ve been wanting to take up, try the things you’ve been putting off, take a day trip to somewhere you’ve never been. This will also help you to get out of your head so you can see life through a different lens- a lens where happiness does exist and life isn’t a struggle.
I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.
