Dallas Bragg explains that sobriety sticks when you engineer your environment to make the sober choice easiest. Remove access to drugs and triggers, lay out what you need for new habits, and force yourself into spaces that require no willpower to stay clean.
So one sure way of setting up success in your sobriety is think about the path of least resistance. This is the maximum benefit with the minimum amount of effort. So for instance, if you are trying to go to the gym early morning, when you wake up, if your clothes and your bottle and your keys, everything is set right there by the bed, it's easier just to get up, get your clothes on, and go out the door. You have eliminated the barriers to going to the gym. Recovery is basically replacing one set of habits with another. In order to do that, you set the environment up so that it's terribly easy to create a new habit because you have eliminated the barriers. So look around your environment. How can you set it up so that there's actually no choice to use? There's no option. There's no access to the drug. This is what you really have to do in the very beginning. That's why they take your phone away from you in rehab. You'll get sober a lot faster and a lot more effectively if you set up the path of least resistance in your life.
