Cultivating Mindfulness in Addiction Recovery
Addiction recovery is a multifaceted process, whether you are recovering from alcohol addiction or a drug abuse disorder. While finding yourself a support system within your friends and family and enrolling in the services of a professional rehabilitation center are crucial, it is important to not overlook the facet that is entirely up to you: mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the awareness of your own thoughts and emotions. This heightened level of awareness allows you to guide and control your thoughts, too, which is extremely helpful during recovery. External temptations to break sobriety are bad, but internal temptations in the form of intrusive thoughts are often the most dangerous. If you can control your thoughts by increasing your mindfulness, then you will be more prepared for the recovery road ahead.
How to Improve Your Mindfulness
Improving your mindfulness is not something that only happens passively. You can take steps to actively make your mindfulness better in your day-to-day life. Generally, people find meditation to be the most effective mindfulness enhancer. However, meditation doesn’t just mean sitting quietly somewhere and controlling or ridding yourself of your thoughts. Meditation can be done at all times, even while you are doing daily chores, reading a book, and so on.
Five mindfulness meditation tips you should know while in recovery are:
- Be a part of your environment: Wherever you are, try to become a part of that environment. The room around you will only be distracting if you see it as something separate from the space of your mind. This is especially important when actively meditating. Be aware of your surroundings, and you will find it will bring a greater control of your thoughts.
- Control your breathing: A key to any meditative state is breathing control. It is well known that you can convince your brain to “slow” or calm down with specific breathing actions. Breathing control is also a great way to take direct control of a bodily function, which will make it easier for you to then find a way to gain control of your thoughts and emotions.
- Tune out your thoughts: To achieve heightened mindfulness, you shouldn’t constantly be thinking about your thoughts. Instead, you should try to turn your thoughts into background noise that you can ignore or enjoy as you wish. If you are someone who struggles with intrusive thoughts and imposter syndrome, this hint might be the most important for your recovery’s future.
- Become your biggest fan: There is never a time to insult, belittle, or humiliate yourself in your mind. You have to become a trusted friend of yourself, which starts with simply being kind to yourself. Failures are part of the human experience to which you belong. They do not call for harsh words. As you gain patience with yourself, it will naturally spill out into your daily interactions with others, too.
- Plan for imperfection: No matter how you try to improve your mindfulness, you should remember that it is a deliberate process and that things can go wrong along the way. Or, more likely, the process might take longer than you expected or wanted. Plan and expect some bumps in the road, and you will give yourself a better chance of mental health and recovery success.
At The Nestled Recovery in Las Vegas, we integrate a variety of therapies and psychotherapies into our recovery programs, including those that focus on or utilize mindfulness. If you need help fighting addiction and you live in Nevada, please contact us online today to see if we’re the right choice to lead you to sobriety.
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