As we work to understand more about our addictions, we come to realize that there are certain factors in our lives that have been contributing to our mental health issues and to the development of our addictions. Our financial stability, or lack thereof, can play a major role in how unhappy we feel on a regular basis, how hard it is to cope with stress and difficulty, and how we go about managing the chaos in our lives. Similarly, our addictions can severely impact our financial well-being in some very catastrophic ways that can be hard to recover from.
When we are struggling financially, we tend to feel a great deal of worry, uncertainty, and doubt about the future. We dread what’s to come, anticipating the worst and assuming we won’t be able to dig ourselves out of the financial hole. We experience heightened stress levels, which not only can exacerbate our depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses, but can also contribute to overall worsening health conditions such as heart disease. We worry we won’t be able to provide for our families. We’re terrified we’ll lose our homes and possessions. We feel constantly on edge, especially if we aren’t earning enough, if we don’t feel we have job security, or if our means of making income is inconsistent. The constant stress can cause us to suffer from breakdowns in both our mental health and our overall health.
When we’re most stressed about our finances, many of us turn to drugs and addictive behaviors for solace, comfort, distraction and escape. Our addictions help us to temporarily turn our thoughts off, allowing us to forget the pile of unpaid bills on our desks, the looming deadlines of upcoming expenses, the ever-increasing debt we’re accruing. We know that our drug use doesn’t help us or our financial situation, but we feel compulsively driven to escape our stress and our fear.
Our addictions and our financial stability are interconnected, and the more we give into our addictions, the more money we spend on them, and the more financially unstable we become. We lose our jobs, our homes and our possessions. We’re unable to care for our children and sometimes even lose custody of them. We hate that we’ve ruined our lives and wasted so much money on drugs. We feel disappointed in ourselves. We feel consumed by regret and painfully ashamed of ourselves, but we feel unable to stop.
We don’t always think about how our addictions affect the different areas of our lives, but our financial well-being is one of the many areas we need to address if we’re going to heal our lives as a whole.
At The Guest House Ocala, you will be treated with dignity, respect and compassion. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.