Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes teaches how to set goals that actually work in recovery: make them time-limited and specific to you, build on what you're already good at, and track progress over perfection. Start small, use supports like sponsors or journaling, then gradually increase the challenge.
Hey there everybody. And welcome back to the Addiction and Mental Health Disorders Treatment Manual. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. This is unit one, part 21. We are finishing up the segment on setting smart goals and figuring out how to set achievable, relevant, time limited goals. It's important to remember that Rome was not built in a day and your problem, whatever it is, wasn't either. So it's going to take time to make that change. You want to ensure that you give yourself the time to make those changes. But as I mentioned in other parts, it's also important to make sure that you're getting rewards and you're seeing your progress. So you want to set goals that are time limited. Daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals. The best goals are built on your strengths and individualized. So if you're trying to address something like depression and one of the things that you want to see is improved energy, okay, that's one of your benchmarks for moving towards happiness. Okay, great. So what strengths? What has worked for you before in the past to help improve your energy? What is one of your strengths? Focus on the things that you're motivated and able to change. If you are trying to work towards happiness, well, that's great. There are a lot of things that you can do. However, there's also other stuff going on in the world, going on in life that is depressing, anxiety, provoking, angering that you cannot change. Focusing on yourself, your inner environment and your immediate outer environment is often a lot more doable in, in terms of things that you're actually able to change. And then as I mentioned, set those small time limited goals weekly, daily, or when you're starting out. Sometimes it's hourly. Can I get through the next hour? I didn't use this hour. Get to next hour or I didn't cry or I didn't go back to bed once. You can do it for an hour, then maybe do it for half a day and then maybe all day. So gradually increase the time that you're trying to exhibit that new behavior. Think of behavior change like learning lines for a play. You wouldn't expect to read the script once and know it by heart. You gotta rehearse it. You're going to need prompts and assistance. So in a, a lot of the other videos that I, that I do, I talk about putting push notifications, I talk about journaling, I talk about having a sponsor or a coach or somebody that can be there for you. I talk about mindfulness. There are a lot of things that you can do to add to your environment, to help motivate you and remind you to make this change and use these new behaviors. As the new behaviors become more second nature, as you move toward recovery, the prompts you need are going to be fewer. It's going to become more default, more autopilot than it is right now. But in the first three to six months, especially when you're making a change, a lot of times prompts are required and perfection is often an unreasonable goal. You want to look towards progress. Now. When we're talking about addiction recovery, for example, remember, relapse starts long before you use. So what you're looking for is if. If you're not perfect in your, in your sobriety, in your recovery, ideally the relapse, what you're looking at is going back into stinking, thinking and then catching it before you actually get all the way back down to using again. Spend about 20 minutes thinking about your problem and your goal and what it's going to look like when you've achieved your goal. All of those things that are going to be different. What is the first thing that you're going to do in addiction recovery? One of the things that we often talk about is going to meetings. 90 and 90. So you may say, I'm going to get clean by starting to go to meetings. I've made a decision not to use, and I'm going to start doing this new behavior instead of using. How often am I going to do this? 90 meetings, 90 days. So you can look at it and say, did I do it? Yes. Check the block. When will this start? Today. It's great to set goals and it's great to say, okay, I'm going to do it this many times. But if you don't ever get started started, then you're never going to finish. So you need to put a start date and then ideally a finish date. That way you know that how long you've got to accomplish it.
