Amber Hollingsworth presents three simple, evidence-aligned daily rituals to help maintain sobriety: (1) proactively plan for sobriety (anticipate triggers, add accountability, change routes/habits), (2) attend to important relationships and practice being of service to others to counteract self-focused addictive thinking, and (3) perform a nightly inventory (brief journaling or reflection to identify problems to address the next day). She also recommends three free resources to support these habits: the "11 Step" app for guided daily check-ins, a free 30 Day Jumpstart short-video email series, and daily recovery influences (podcast/video/book/meeting). Links to recovery coaching and a playlist "Conquering an Addiction" are offered as next steps.
Chapters
Here are three, actually really quite easy daily rituals that will help you maintain your sobriety. Although they're easy, they are highly effective. These things work. And before you guess it, I'm not going to tell you, go to a meeting every day. It's not that I'm against that. It's just that I'm guessing you've probably been told that already, but it's not for everyone. So I want to give you three other things that maybe other people haven't told you. And stay tuned, because I'm also going to give you three free resources to help you maintain your sobriety and get this stuff done. All right, the first daily ritual is you need to plan for your sobriety. Yes, I know you've decided to get clean and sober to maintain abstinence on whatever that addictive behavior is, but it's going to take a lot more than just making the decision. Just like a lot of plan and energy went into maintaining the addiction, there. There's going to need to be some planning and energy go into maintaining your sobriety, especially in the early days. Now, eventually, sobriety is going to be like your new autopilot, and it doesn't take nearly as much energy and effort. But in the beginning, you need to plan for it, which could mean you need to put some accountability in place, which could mean maybe you decide not to take cash or credit cards with you. Maybe it means that you decide to take certain routes to and from work or have people go with you to certain places, or decide what you're going to do after work so that you know you're not going to go engage in addictive behavior. That's what I mean when I say plan for your sobriety. I once had this young adult guy. He was in one of our intensive outpatient programs that we used to run, and he would say, now if I put my gym bag in my car before I leave for work or school, I know I'm not going to drink that day, but if I don't put my gym bag in there, and then I tell myself, well, I might go to the gym after, but I'm gonna go home and get my stuff first, then I'm probably gonna drink. And so it was a way of planning for sobriety. What are you going to do instead? How are you going to make sure that you get through the day? Staying on track. The second thing that I want you to do is I want you to pay close attention to your relationships. Not every single relationship, but, like the important ones, the people closest to you. This one can be kind of hard because I know in the early days a lot of those relationships might have some problems. People might be frustrated with you. And it's really hard to engage in those relationships because maybe you've done some things you regret, or maybe they're always reminding you of things, things or they're asking you questions. But if you will spend the time nurturing those relationships, smoothing things over, getting things back on track, it's going to go a million miles towards helping you keep your sanity. Because nothing is going to throw you off track more than the frustration and difficulties that happen in our relationships. Getting resentment, feeling sorry for ourselves, feeling angry towards people, feeling frustrated about something that's not going right. And usually all of that is related to relationships. If you're not sure how to go about doing that, then what I want you to do is just focus, focus on being of service to other people. Now this is a really old school like recovery principle, but it works not just because, oh, you've been bad and now you need to be good. Like it works on a scientific level when you are of service to other people. Number one, that's like the opposite of addiction. Because when we're in our addictive cells, let's face it, we're in our selfish cells. Addiction is a very self serving state of mind. I'm not saying you're a selfish person, but let's be honest. Addiction brings us to that selfish part of ourselves which we all have, okay? Not judgment. But when we are in service of others, it takes us out of that selfish state of mind. And bonus, when you're in service of other people, you start to actually feel better about yourself. You start to feel proud of yourself. You start to feel good about who you are and in fact changes your brain chemistry in a way that actually protects you from addiction. So pay attention to your relationships, focus on being of service to other people. Get out of your own mind. And that will go a long, long way to helping you maintain your abstinence or sobriety. So now the third really good habit to get into is to do what's called a nightly inventory. For those of you who are in 12 steps, or maybe you've been involved in 12 steps, it's kind of like the 11th step, okay? But you don't have to work a 12 step program to be able to incorporate this into your life. Basically, at the end of every night, take a few minutes, maybe you journal it, maybe you just have some self reflection meditation on it, whatever. But take a few minutes and look through your day and see if there are any problems or messes that are either lurking, haunting you, things you're like, trying not to deal with, things you're procrastinating on, things you did or said throughout the day that you kind of wish you didn't have. Sort of. It's called take inventory. Because you're kind of like looking over the course of the day and saying, is there anything out here that needs to be addressed? Whether it's something I did or said I wish I wouldn't, something I'm avoiding, something I need to take action on, a difficult conversation I need to have. Because if you'll do this and then you'll make a plan on how to address it the next day, you're basically keeping your life maintained really well. It's kind of like the best way I know describe it. It's kind of like, you know, it's like if you, you use a dish, if you'll rinse it off, put it in dishwasher, then you don't get a whole bunch of dirty dishes piled up in the sink. That's what doing like an inventory is like. If you don't do that, then you could get a big pile of dirty dishes. Only it's a lot worse than dirty dishes because it's like a pile of life messes that you haven't dealt with that you've been avoiding that can eventually feel overwhelming and make you want to run and hide. And guess what? Most of us do to run and hide. We want to run to our addictive behaviors. So to avoid that, let's not put ourselves in that position of being overwhelmed. Let's take care of it day by day. Day. Now, I told you I was going to tell you three really good free resources. One of those is actually an app you can put on your phone. It's called the 11 step app. I really like it because it will actually ask you the questions because maybe you're like, well, I don't know what to ask myself or I don't know what to journal, the app will actually ask you the questions that I actually ask you to score yourself. And the really cool thing about it is it kind of like keeps up with you a little bit and creates like a baseline. So if your numbers start to get real baseline, it's going to be like, hey, you might be in relapse warning signs here. Which is kind of cool because you're looking at not just what's going on day by day, but like over a period of time. Time to Sort of check and see how you're doing. Because the thing about recovery is it's really just about sanity. If you want to stay sober, you got to stay sane, you got to take care of things as they come. You got to be proactive and on top of things. Because addiction is all about running from things and we want to get out of that habit now. Another really good free resource is I actually have a cool short video series called the 30 Day Jumpstart. You can actually sign up for this. It's totally free. And you'll get a little video message that comes to your inbox every day. And I'm talking about like between two and four minute videos. These videos are specifically designed to help you stay motivated, overcome roadblocks and challenges, and stay on track. Just a little piece of wisdom, piece of advice, something to think about throughout the day to help you stay focused. I'll put the link in the description in case you want to sign up for 30 day jumpstart. Like I said, it's easy, it's free, it comes right to you so that it's another one of those things that's helping you to plan for recovery. And it's on autopilot, which is what makes it so cool. And another really easy free resource is just put into your life some kind of recovery influence, which could be a podcast, a video, a book, or even a meeting, if you like meetings. But put some kind of recovery influence into your life every day. It's going to help you stay motivated and focused and on track. And like I said, even if you don't want to go to a meeting, it's not that hard. No excuses. You can get any of this stuff for free anytime, 24 7. Now, if you want more than just that and you feel like you need a little bit of help digging out of the hole or at least maintaining your sobriety, then I will also put the link in the description if you want to learn more about our recovery coaching options, if you want to go more in depth about it. And up next, I'm going to put our video playlist for you called Conquering an Addiction, which is a perfect place to start if you're new and early in this process. I'll see you next time.
