According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 60% of individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) will enter sustained recovery, yet many will relapse first. The thought of relapse after all your hard work in treatment can leave you feeling defeated. However, your risk for relapse post-treatment is not an inevitable thing. Rather, relapse is a risk that fluctuates based on how you approach both early and long-term recovery. In particular, relapse has been tied to early recovery because it is a vulnerable time in the recovery process. Thus, understanding challenges in recovery can provide insight into how to avoid relapse and rediscover joy in sober living.
Although there will always be stressors in sober living, you can build resilience to overcome the effects of those stressors. In treatment, you have learned how to build adaptive coping skills that support your resilience in recovery. Yet, life stressors and other mental health challenges can erode your resilience and increase your risk for relapse. Thus, you are reminded that recovery is not a one-dimensional process or a finish line.
Long-term recovery for sober living does not start and end with treatment. Rather, sober living in long-term recovery is a dynamic process in which you learn how to live independently without substances. Understandably, thinking about the lifelong process of early and long-term recovery can sound daunting and exhausting. However, with the support of an alumni program, sober living can be a source of joy rather than pain.
At The Guest House, we know that recovery from addiction and or co-occurring mental health disorders is an ongoing process. Understanding the ongoing lifelong process of recovery gives insight into the tools you need to thrive in sober living. Building a fulfilling and purposeful life in recovery is made possible by connections and the effort you put in post-treatment. Through our commitment to holistic healing, we can offer alumni support to enrich and rediscover joy in sober living.
Now you can look at the challenges of sober living in early recovery to dismantle their impact.
Addressing the Challenges of Sober Living
Experiencing challenges in early recovery is common, thus you are not a failure or doing something wrong. As noted in Substance Abuse: Research and Treatment, recovery does not “cure” you of illness, crisis, or trauma. Rather, recovery is a process of change in which you improve your health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach your full potential. Moreover, recovery is a unique and deeply individual experience. Therefore, you may experience challenges similar to those of your peers. Yet, how you address those challenges in sober living will be unique to you.
Listed below are some of the challenges you may encounter in early recovery:
- Relapse triggers and cravings
- Finding ways to fill your time without substances
- Conflicting feelings about your relationship with family and friends who still misuse substances
- Conflict with family and friends who do not understand or respect your sobriety
- Working on repairing and rebuilding relationships that were harmed by your substance use
- Build a support system with new and known loved ones
- Learning how to manage stress
- Dealing with negative feelings and thoughts you use to self-medicate to avoid
- Learning how to change old unhealthy habits in other domains of your life
- Building new relationships
- Learning how to build new healthy coping strategies and habits
- Making the transition from around-the-clock support to independence
- Finding or rediscovering your purpose and fulfillment
- Boredom
- Anhedonia
While challenges like triggers, cravings, and complicated relationships are common and well-known, others are not. In particular, people often overlook the challenge of boredom in sober living. Moreover, many people are unaware of what anhedonia is and how it impacts sober living. Thus, understanding boredom and anhedonia can help you find ways to overcome challenges for joy in sober living.
Understanding the Impact of Recovery Challenges
Boredom is a common challenge in recovery as addiction eats up most of your time, attention, and energy. The shift from treatment in a residential program to living independently in recovery can be a bit of a shock to the system. In a residential treatment program, you get used to living in a highly structured environment where your day is filled with activities. For example, in your treatment program, you may have had a daily or weekly schedule that included, individual and group therapy, exercise, and nutrition classes. The loss of the high level of structure you experienced in treatment can be jarring and difficult to get over, especially when you lack a support network.
When your everyday shift from substance use and structured treatment to nothing, it can be difficult to find ways to fill your time. It can be challenging to find ways to fill your newfound time when you are still learning who this new you is in sober living. Further, while boredom is one of the most common challenges to sober living, it is one of the biggest risk factors for relapse. One of the many ways boredom can put you at risk for relapse is an abundance of free time. With an abundance of free time, it is easier to gravitate to using substances again to alleviate your boredom.
Moreover, boredom is often tied to isolation as sober living can distance you from friends who are still misusing alcohol and or drugs. Without those old connections, you can feel isolated and lonely, especially when you have not built new social connections or sought out sober activities and hobbies to fill your time. In addition to boredom, anhedonia can be detrimental to your recovery. Yet, many people have never heard the word anhedonia before. According to Frontiers in Psychiatry, anhedonia is generally defined as the inability to experience pleasure. Moreover, in “Anhedonia” the Cleveland Clinic defines anhedonia as a lack of interest and inability to experience enjoyment or pleasure.
Anhedonia is a common symptom of many mental health disorders like depression, bipolar disorder (BP), schizophrenia, substance use disorder (SUD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Further, anhedonia can be broken into two types, physical and social anhedonia:
- Physical Anhedonia
- You experience a reduced interest and pleasure in engaging in physical experiences
- Formally pleasurable things like smells, sounds, and physical touch do not bring joy
- Eating and tasting food
- Smelling flowers and food
- Physical and sexual intimacy
- Listening to music
- Formally pleasurable things like smells, sounds, and physical touch do not bring joy
- You experience a reduced interest and pleasure in engaging in physical experiences
- Social Anhedonia
- You experience reduced interest and pleasure in social engagement or being around people
- Social withdrawal
- You prefer to be alone
- Diminished enjoyment in your social interactions
- You have fewer close interpersonal relationships
- A reduction in social skills
- While anhedonia shares social withdrawal as a feature like in social anxiety, they are not the same
- Social anxiety is rooted in a fear of social interactions due to a persistent belief that you are being watched and judged
- Whereas anhedonia is a decreased sense of reward from your social interactions
- You experience reduced interest and pleasure in social engagement or being around people
Not only does anhedonia reduce your ability to experience pleasure, but that reward center loss also decreases motivation. A decrease in motivation disrupts your ability or desire to seek out pleasurable things like spending time with loved ones or watching your favorite shows. Yet, what causes this lack of pleasure in anhedonia? The core feature of anhedonia is the loss of pleasure as it relates to the reward centers in your brain.
Due to changes in brain activity, the parts of the brain that anticipate rewards and are motivated to seek rewards are impaired. Further, the complications of reward loss from anhedonia can be seen in challenges with SUD and recovery. In “Addiction, Anhedonia, and Comorbid Mood Disorder” by Marianne Destoop et al., they note that anhedonia-like symptoms have been found in chronic substance use, withdrawal, and sustained abstinence. The presence of anhedonia-like symptoms in SUD and recovery is related to a diminished interest or pleasure in activities that are naturally rewarding as an essential characteristic of addiction.
In sober living, anhedonia is a part of the symptomatology that greatly factors into the risk of relapse. With addiction, your brain often releases a greater amount of dopamine to the reward centers of your brain, which support the maintenance of addiction. When you go through withdrawal and abstinence, your brain has difficulty functioning because you have built up a tolerance to excessive amounts of dopamine and have fewer receptors to receive and send signals of pleasure. Thus, the release of a normal amount of dopamine in the brain during abstinence can leave normal feelings of pleasure and joy feeling muted.
Despite sober living challenges like boredom and anhedonia, sustained recovery is possible. With awareness, support, and time you can overcome recovery obstacles for sustained sober living.
Overcoming Recovery Obstacles to Sober Living
Recognizing the presence of early recovery obstacles like boredom and anhedonia is the first step toward releasing yourself and dismantling those challenges to thrive in recovery. Listed below are some of the ways you can overcome boredom and anhedonia in your recovery:
Boredom
- Seek out sober hobbies and passions to fill your spare time and gain a sense of fulfillment
- Take up painting or drawing
- Learn to play an instrument
- Take cooking classes
- Explore gardening
- Learn something new
- Take a class at your local community college
- Give back to your community with volunteer work
- Food banks
- Shelters
- Animal shelters
- Community center
- Local art museum or institute
- Parks
- Join a support group and participate in your alumni to connect with sober peers
- Connect with supportive loved ones
- Make a list of trusted people who are supportive of your recovery
- Go on walks together
- Cook together
- Have movie and or game nights
- Make a list of trusted people who are supportive of your recovery
- Spend time in nature and engage in outdoor activities
- Hiking
- Walking
- Biking
- Swimming
- Engage in physical activities
- Start a fitness group
- Take a fitness class
- Join a sports league like basketball, flag football, or ultimate frisbee
- Practice mindfulness
- Deep breathing
- Yoga
- Meditation
- Add structure to your life by planning out each day
- Work, school, exercise, hobbies, and spending time with loved ones
Anhedonia
- Talking with your therapist
- Increasing your awareness and understanding of anhedonia
- Engaging in creative art therapies
- Art therapy
- Music therapy
- Eating nutritious meals
- Meditation
- Yoga
- High energy workouts
- Jogging
- Running
- Circuit training
- HIIT workouts
- Strength training
- Engaging in strong and weak social tie interactions
- Reflecting on moments of positivity
- Writing in a journal
- Say one thing or person you are grateful for every day
- Practicing positive self-talk
- Replacing negative thoughts with positive ones
Looking at some of the ways you can overcome boredom and anhedonia highlights the power of social connection as a tool for recovery. With the support of a strong support system, you find new passions in sober living that offer meaning and purpose.
Finding Joy: Ways to Find Joy in Sober Living
Although it can feel difficult at first, engaging in a variety of sober activities can support wellness and help reignite your joy in life. In the early stages of recovery, you can convince yourself that you were happier with drugs in your system. However, taking time to reflect on your life in addiction can help you recognize when you are glamourizing your past substance use.
Moreover, engaging in your alumni program gives you space to connect with peers who are or have gone through similar things as you. Through connection and peer support, you can find the guidance, motivation, and accountability you need to seek out sober opportunities for growth even when you feel like withdrawing into yourself. Some ways engaging with alumni can help you find joy in sober living include:
- Learning from shared experiences in group meetings
- Building a community of supportive individuals
- Finding prolonged hope and peace for recovery in new supportive friendships with sober peers
- Fostering a healthier social life with sober activities
- Peers in alumni can help remind you of the joys of recovery and everything you have overcome
Thus, social connection and learning from the ups and downs of others’ experiences can inspire and drive you forward in your recovery. Moreover, going through recovery is made more meaningful and resilient to the stressors of life when you do not go alone. Going through life and recovery with a group of people who love and believe in you can be extraordinary for fostering long-term recovery.
Further, as you go through recovery, it is important to remember that joy is not a static thing. Joy is evoked by a variety of important domains in life, from well-being and success to good fortune and satisfaction. The things that bring you joy will change throughout your life and the beauty of recovery is the rediscovery of the opportunity to live in a state of discovery and openness throughout life. You have a new lease on life to find joy and fulfillment in yourself and with others without the fog of addiction.
Rediscovering Joy With Alumni at The Guest House
The early stages of recovery can leave you filled with doubt about your ability to maintain your recovery. Maintaining recovery can feel especially daunting with the perception that addiction is a chronic relapsing disease. Moreover, learning to navigate your newfound independence and rebuilding your life presents a new set of challenges to overcome. However, even with setbacks, you can overcome challenges in recovery with a strong support network.
At The Guest House, we know the support of others is crucial when you are readjusting to life in recovery. Doing things alone, especially in recovery only contributes to isolation, loneliness, and increased distress. On the other hand, connecting with your peers gives you the support you need to overcome obstacles and celebrate your success. Thus, a holistic approach to care gives you access to an alumni group built on unconditional love and support.
Holistic care in alumni helps rediscover sober living as a source of joy, growth, and personal development. Humans are naturally social creatures who thrive on connection to each other. As a result, your engagement with alumni gives you a lifetime of community and support to enrich your life. No matter where you are on your recovery journey, a strong and connected alumni group can empower you. You are empowered to live the meaningful and fulfilling life you deserve in long-term recovery.
Finding joy in recovery can be impeded by challenges in early recovery. From triggers and cravings to boredom and anhedonia, challenges in early recovery can convince you that recovery is impossible. In particular, boredom and anhedonia are born out of a lack of ways to fill your newfound time and recover from dopamine tolerance that impairs pleasure, respectively. However, finding and building healthy connections with others can give you the motivation and support you need to find sober activities that support joy. Therefore, The Guest House is committed to providing a strong alumni group, where you can rediscover joy and build a community of unconditional love, guidance, and support to thrive in sober living. Call us at (855) 483-7800 today.