How Can Relapse Be Prevented?

Learn Your Triggers 

A crucial first step for making a sustained recovery is learning what your relapse triggers are. Relapse triggers can vary significantly from individual to individual, and they are usually associated with what brought on the addiction in the first place. They can range from anything from memories and past events to certain individuals or stressful situations. Learning what these are can help you proactively avoid these triggers and instead occupy yourself with other activities and healthier thought-patterns. Read our blog on what relapses are. 

Adopt a Routine 

One of the best ways to avoid your triggers or your cravings is by adopting a new routine. By creating a schedule and organising your time effectively, you can adopt a healthier lifestyle that distracts you from cravings and discourages triggers. This is because having a routine can add much needed focus for your day-to-day life.  

Rather than wondering how you might spend your time and become tempted to slip into old habits or thought patterns, having a set routine can give you new things to focus on and gain motivation from. From picking up a new hobby, to cooking and sleeping at set times, you can start to gain a greater sense of purpose to your day-to-day life, making it feel both more manageable and enjoyable. If sustained, this can help you replace old habits with newer, healthier ones. 

Seek Support from Others  

More than just creating a new routine however will be needed to make a sustained, long-term recovery. Feelings of loneliness can pervade all of us at certain times of our lives, and often adopting a new routine can lead to more time spent alone. That’s why it’s crucial to seek support from others along your recovery journey. Whether that’s opening up to friends and family about your triggers or joining a local society or group to make new friends, preventing relapse will feel much more manageable if you have others around you. They can help keep you distracted, and a burden shared is always a burden halved. Read our blog on how you can support a recovering loved one. 

Pick-up a New Hobby 

Another crucial step to avoiding triggers and cravings is by picking up a new hobby. Hobbies can not only keep you distracted from cravings and triggers, but scientifically they can help replace older habits with newer, healthier ones. The endorphins you might get from physical activity or the serotonin from meeting-up with other like-minded people, can work wonders for your mental health. Whether it’s running, cooking, golf, painting, rock-climbing or badminton, there’s always something new and fun to chuck yourself into!  

As well as helping you create a more orderly routine, hobbies can help bring about new-found pleasure and purpose to your life. What’s more, hobbies can also present endless opportunities for socialisation – see if there are specific groups or societies in your area for the activities that you’re into and set about creating a healthier lifestyle that works for you. 

Practice Mindfulness 

Another useful technique for preventing a relapse is by practicing mindfulness. By mindfulness, we mean the state of mind where you temporarily relieve yourself of all your worries and stresses, instead choosing to focus on the moment. This can be achieved by meditating - the act of focusing on one thing and one thing only - and thereby silencing the mind. It could be your breathing, or an activity like yoga or running, which temporarily silences the mind.  

Often, the constant mind-chatter that goes on inside our heads can become overwhelming and start to adversely affect our mood. This can be painful memories, feelings of self-doubt, or other negative emotions. If these emotions surface, they can act as emotional triggers for relapse. Practicing mindfulness can help you to silence the mind, allowing you to take back control of your feelings and emotions, and better manage them. If practised effectively, you’ll be in a better place to deal with negative feelings and emotions when they re-do surface, which will help you to stop triggers at source. In their place, you can then set about creating healthier, more productive though-patterns. Read up on mindfulness-for-addiction-recovery log. 

Find Ways to Express your Emotions 

Often, individuals who relapse do so because they become exposed to their triggers. If these triggers are emotion-based, they might feel powerless to resist if they become overwhelming. Turning to alcohol or substances may then be a coping mechanism for dealing with such emotions. That’s why it’s important to plan for scenarios where one’s emotions may get too much for them. Finding new ways to express your emotions is therefore crucial in this instance. It could be by engaging in your hobby, diarying your thoughts and feelings, performing physical activity, or seeking support from others. Finding new ways to process your emotions can help you better deal with your triggers and cravings and give you a greater sense of self-control over them that’s crucial for long-term recovery. 

Avoid Stressful Situations 

However, if your triggers are more social, it’s also advisable to avoid – as far as possible – all of the scenarios in which you might become stressed and tempted to relapse. Whilst no-one can ever claim to lead a stress-free life, and stress is certainly inevitable in our busy day-to-day lives, limiting these instances can help stop your triggers at their source. Whether it’s avoiding social meetups with people who have a negative influence on you, or not going to the places where your addiction first started, you can give yourself a massive helping hand for avoiding a relapse. 

Seek After-care Support from a Rehabilitation Clinic 

It’s important if you have undergone rehabilitative therapy for a drug or alcohol addiction to continue to seek support from your service provider. They might be able to offer you tailored after-care support in the form of 1-to-1’s, group therapy, goal-setting sessions and other forms of professional guidance. They’ll be best placed to offer you the professional help you need to make a sustained, long-term recovery.