The Path Out of Addiction:
Fitness Routines for Long-Term Recovery
Drugs and alcohol are often so powerfully addictive that in order to find sobriety, people require interventions, support groups, and drastically altering their lifestyles, including finding an exercise regimen that keeps them on the path to recovery. Exercise offers a range of beneficial effects, including restoring physical hardiness, improving one’s outlook, and calming a mind long unsettled by substance-induced imbalances. Here are some of the most effective exercise tips for facilitating addiction recovery.
Take It Easy
A steady supply of alcohol and narcotics to the brain actually changes the way it functions, so healing from substance abuse takes an enormous toll on the body, inducing symptoms such as insomnia, faulty memory, revived anxiety, and the horrors of withdrawal. With all that to overcome, it’s important to ease into your exercise regimen. Walk 10 minutes a day, then 15, and then 20 – but don’t start out walking 10 miles, only to exhaust yourself and give up exercising altogether. Be patient, and work up your strength and stamina bit by bit, so that you don’t flame out too early.
Have Fun
People often abuse substances to fight off anxiety, with the result that the relief they find is temporary, and once it dwindles, the anxiety that returns is stronger. Substituting exercise for substance use can help a person in recovery better manage stressors, triggers, and cravings. So whether you’re surfing or snowboarding, boxing or doing yoga, start doing something you actually like, so that you find it rewarding and you go back to it again and again.
Partner Up
Support programs are essential to recovery, with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration(SAMHSA) listing no less than nine self-help groups – Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Al-Anon Family Groups, Nar-Anon, and more. To sustain a lasting recovery, people need the support of peers who have also battled addiction, and that logic applies to anyone subbing out substances for fitness. Find someone else in recovery, and come up with a plan. Text that person your progress at the gym. Meet at each other’s houses to go running. Hold one another accountable to your routine – but in a way that’s not judgmental, and that allows for occasional missteps and lapses.
Branch Out
The best way to stay fit is to find an exercise that you want to keep doing over and over. If skiing or volleyball or white-water rafting is your thing, more power to you. But if you find your fitness goals plateauing, or if you find yourself bored with your routine, try varying it up. Make a list of your favorite exercises and switch them around. Adapt your routine so that you surprise your body – go sprinting instead of jogging, hit the gym at night rather than in the morning, even download an “exergame” like “Zombies, Run!” (yes, it’s for real) that motivates you to get moving by turning you into a character who has to outwit and outrun a zombie apocalypse.
Finding the right way out of addiction is a lifelong quandary, but developing an exercise schedule that clears your mind, gets you active, and keeps you away from drugs and alcohol is a good place to start. Addiction is essentially despair, and recovery survivors should do whatever they need to rid their lives of that despair – music, gardening, volunteering, or reconnecting with loved ones. But if exercise is your chosen vehicle out of addiction, let it guide you toward a sense of purpose and joy and revival.
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