Amber Hollingsworth (master addiction counselor) presents a short YouTube talk outlining three core reasons sobriety can feel difficult — mindset, motivation, and momentum — and gives practical, actionable strategies to address each: reframe automatic negative thoughts (mindset), design an encouraging environment to sustain motivation (motivation), and keep forward movement through goals and activities (momentum). The video ends with a call-to-action to sign up for a free 30-day jumpstart email/video program.
Chapters
If you're finding sobriety hard, it's probably because of one of these three reasons. In fact, it's these three things that get people thinking about just abandoning recovery altogether. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth. I'm a master addiction counselor, and I've been helping people and families overcome addiction for 20 years now. And I created this YouTube channel to make sure that you always stay five steps ahead of addiction. The only way to beat addiction is through strategy. And today we're going to be talking about just that thing. If you're finding yourself having a lot more cravings, thinking about using, drinking, or engaging in other addictive behavior and you're not sure why or what to do about it, I want you to focus on these three items. And the first one is mindset. The words you choose matter, even words that you don't even say out loud, but the words you use inside your own head. If you allow your focus to go towards negativity, that's going to shift your emotions towards negativity, which is going to create negative behavior, which is going to get you a negative response from the universe. Universe. Let me give you an example of what I mean. If you're not careful, you can let your thoughts wander into the darkness. Something like, okay, I haven't drank in 30 days, but my marriage is still a mess. Or, well, I quit using drugs, but that didn't fix everything. Or, why does everyone else get to have fun and I don't? That sure doesn't seem fair. Now, all of those thoughts are really alluring because they may have a teensy bit of truth there. But when we focus in on those thoughts, we ignore the some of the counter arguments or other things that are also there. Here's a more positive but truthful thought. For example, instead of the partial truth, let's look at the whole truth. So, for example, it could be, yes, I quit drinking and my marriage isn't perfect yet, but at least I don't have to wake up and wonder what I did the night before. Or you could have a thought like, okay, everything in my life didn't get fixed automatically just because I quit using drugs, but at least now I have the energy and motivation and the wits about me to solve these problems. You see, addiction wants you to constantly focus on the negative. It's going to feed you a narrative that will lead you back into your addictive behaviors. In most cases, it's just showing you a part of the picture and not showing you the whole picture. So I'm not telling you to just fill your head with sunshines and rainbows and be some kind of, like, complete optimist who's just, like, totally lying to themselves all the time. That's not what I'm saying at all. But I am challenging you to confront some of those automatic negative thought processes. Now, the second big factor that, if it's not going right, is going to lead you down the road to relapse, make you go backwards, is motivation. Keeping your motivation up is going to make recovery so much easier. In fact, it won't even feel hard. You'll feel excited about what you're doing. But it's important not to rely on willpower alone to get you there, because they're going to be days you wake up and you're not motivated. And maybe you don't want to go to your counseling session or you don't want to have that difficult conversation with your wife. You're not always going to feel like it, and that's okay. That's totally normal. So. So what you want to do is you want to create an environment that will help you stay motivated. Surround yourself with people, places, things, thoughts, ideas, music that makes you feel encouraged, that makes you want to be the best you like. For example, maybe when you hear, like, the Eye of the Tiger song, you want to get your exercise on. So, for example, a lot of people will make playlists that they use just for when they exercise or work out. It's like their workout playlist, because they know when they hear this music, it's going to get them pumped. That's what I'm telling you to do. Make your recovery, recovery playlist. Now, that can be music, books, videos, meetings, people, church, whatever you want it to be. But surround yourself with the kind of influence that brings the best out in you, and the motivation will naturally come. It's a lot easier to do that and sort of program this automatic environment than it is to, like, pump yourself up every single day just by yourself, from the inside. And that leads me to number three, which is momentum. In recovery, when you stop moving forward, you automatically move backward. There's no such thing as standing still, not doing anything, not making any choices, not making progress, will cause your recovery muscles to atrophy. So try to keep yourself motivated to being your best self. To always be growing and working on something, working towards a goal that's very important to you. What that does is it gives you other, better, more exciting, more important things to think about. So your mind doesn't have a lot of time to wander into the dark pit, get into those negative thoughts, lose your motivation and gradually slide backwards. If you'll take care of these three things, not only will you stay sober, but you'll be excited about it. You'll feel good about it. You're going to know for sure that getting sober was the best decision that you ever made. Now to help you keep your mindset, motivation and momentum on track, I want to give you access to my free 30 day jumpstart program. It's basically 30 days of very short video messages that come right to your inbox that are specifically designed to keep you motivated and help you overcome roadblocks. You can sign up for that and it will do its job on autopilot for you, which is the perfect example of create the kind of environment to keep you motivated. The link is in the description and I will also put it right up here. All you have to do is click it and up next I want you to watch this video which goes more in depth about recovery, momentum.
