Many of us are encouraged in our lives to express kindness outwardly, to be kind, to share and to lavish others with sympathy, empathy, and humility. Nonetheless, it often seems less normal when we are doing these things to ourselves. If you have spent time in a depressed state, which is demonstrably contingent, you may have spent a great deal of your sober period in shame, anxiety and perhaps self-abhorrent. It’s important to love yourself and practice self-care for yourself during your journey through sobriety. Today, let’s discuss meditation and other forms of self-care you should be using during your recovery.
Recovering with self-care
Self-care can be attitude stabilizing in addiction recovery. Taking care of yourself can be anything from reading a book, playing a game, working out, or even practicing meditation. Self-care can anything that brings serenity, joy, and improvement to your life.
Self-care can be quite personal with this broad definition. The three self-care forms frequently stated in rehabilitation from dependency are moral, emotional and physical.
Importance of Self-care
Addiction influences the attitude, inspiration, self-perception, and sense of well-being adversely. People who abuse substances normally do so as to reduce stress, deal with negative emotions, and avoid depression. Stress, depression, and anxiety are some of the main causes of continual use once a dependency arises. Thankfully, self-care can fight against those emotions.
A lack of self-care makes those feelings reappear and causes a person to feel vulnerable to relapse and negative thoughts. If you don’t think of yourself and your well-being, your morale will drop, your focus will decline, and the ability to deal with triggers will not be sufficient.
A strong system of self-care makes you balance your attitude and gives you more strength, inspiration, and better coping skills. Even the smallest forms of self-care can bring strengthened morale, self-esteem, and confidence in your sobriety. now, let’s talk about how you can practice self-care.
Types of Self-Care
Spiritual Self-Care
You will discover the divine heart through spiritual enlightenment. You can see what can help you get a clearer understanding of your spirituality by experimentation of various ideas and practices. You will strive to be at peace with the best version of yourself. Those who follow a spiritual journey are often identified through acts of kindness and dedication to others. This is often done through prayer, self-reflection, or spiritual traditions.
Emotional Self-Care
It’s important to be able to have people around you that help raise you and keep you healthy. Emotional self-care means surrounding yourself with people and things that make you happy and make you feel supported. Recovery is much easier when you are surrounded by people or things that make you feel supported and loved. Emotional self-care is important to develop self-confidence and achieve a positive outlook on where you are in your journey through sobriety.
Physical Self-Care
Physical self-care means living healthier and treating your body right. We’ve discussed how to treat your mind right, now it’s time to talk about the body. There’s no denying that when we are healthy, we are our best selves; and what’s the best way to be healthy? Live healthily! Eat natural foods, exercise, get outside more, practice anything that enhances your physical well-being. Sobriety is already about taking care of your body, so why not continue taking care of your body and develop healthy lifestyle choices? Ultimately, sobriety is all about self-care, self-care is all about loving yourself, and loving yourself is all about helping you be the best version of yourself.
Love as Self-Care
Above that, we discussed all the various forms of self-handling of addiction, spiritual, mental, and human. Ultimately, whether we eat better, take a run, or go to church, we are loving ourselves. The best way to practice self-love during sobriety is to guard yourself mentally and emotionally. This can be done through therapy. Therapy is one of the best ways to show yourself some love. It is a way of self-improving and it can help you find out how to best love yourself. In this situation, we are talking about addiction. Therapy can help you realize that substance abuse was not loving yourself, but sobriety is. it can help a person find ways of dealing with withdrawal and cravings so that they can continue loving themselves throughout their journey in sobriety.
Knowing Meditation
Meditation is a ritual that transforms the subconscious that has been practiced for thousands of years. It encourages concentration, understanding, and control of emotions. It helps you to remain confident, comfortable and concentrated by emphasizing the connection between mind and body.
Various forms of mindfulness can be performed. A peaceful spot can be found where you can either sit or lie down to focus on calming yourself, your breath and your thoughts.
Meditation increases the internal tranquility, awareness of oneself, mental function, and allows you to detach from your emotions and desires which can help alleviate cravings for former addicts. This has a soothing effect that decreases stress and anxiety which is essential for recovery. For instance, your breath can be slowed down, so your nerves will calm. If a former addict is unable to find ways of coping with stress/anxiety, they may be more likely to relapse.
Meditation enhances overall physical and mental health by:
- Reducing blood pressure
- Building up the immune system
- Loosening tight muscles, increasing relaxation
- Decrease stress and anxiety
- Avoiding any cravings to use substances again.
The best thing about meditation is that it can be quickly practiced and performed anywhere, anytime. Meditation can be a great form of self-care during your recovery, and even beyond.
Sobriety is all about living a life of self-care and self-improvement. It requires you to be gentle and kind to yourself since you had previously been so unkind to your body; though unintentional. The path to loving yourself is a journey of transformation and a full-hearted life. During your recovery, and even afterward, it’s best to adopt some form of self-care so as to ensure long-term sobriety. Practicing meditation, exercising, eating better, journaling, picking up new hobbies, etc. are all great ways to self-care during recovery. Anything that helps you live a happier, better life can be considered self-care, so long as it is beneficial to your mental and physical well-being.
