Amber Hollingsworth explains how to maintain early sobriety while traveling by using smartphone/tablet recovery apps. She urges doing something recovery-related every day and recommends specific apps—AA2GO (recorded AA speaker meetings), Joe & Charlie (step teachings via stories/metaphors), and the 11th Step app (daily inventory and trend alerts)—framing this practice as "recovery to go."
Chapters
If you're techie enough to be listening to this video, then I'm going to assume that you probably have a smartphone or a tablet or at least a laptop. Here's your lesson for today. Put some recovery apps on it and you'll be able to access recovery from anywhere at any time that you need it. There's a lot of really cool ones I'll tell you about my favorite ones. So sometimes I see business guys and they travel all over or it's difficult for them to get to a meeting every day or something like that and they say, well, I just can't do it. I've got all these obligations. Well, number one, you can go to an online meeting, but there are a lot of other things you can do in recovery app. The key here is do something important for your recovery every day. Keep. Keep it in the forefront, right in the center of your mind all the time, especially in the beginning. Because if you don't, you're not gonna make it through. Because when you don't put recovery first, you usually lose it. Alright, here's my favorite recovery apps. There's AN app called AA2GO and basically you put it on your phone, it's got a triangle on it and I think it's kind of purple, sort of a purple bluish color. And what happens on this app is it's actually a bunch of recorded speaker meetings. And my favorite meetings are speaker meetings. Even if you're not like a huge AA fan, don't you just love to hear people's stories? I think that it just helps us to connect and I always get something from it. So anyways, on this app it's a bunch of recorded speaker meetings and some of them are newer and some of them are like old. Like there's one in there you can actually hear Bill Wilson. Hopefully you know who that is. If you don't, he's the founder of aa, talking at some kind of like conference or workshop or something. Some of them are so old it almost sounds like they're like on a record. And it's a little scratchy, but it's cool. You know, they have young people and older people and all different kinds of stories. Not only can you connect to it, but what really strikes me about it is how different everyone's journey is. Recovery comes in all different shapes and sizes. Okay. My favorite one, even more favorite than aa2go, is an app called Joe and Charlie. It looks almost the same as a A2 go. Visually, it's that same purple bluish color with the Triangle on it. Joe and Charlie are these two old Southern dudes that teach the steps. They're not professionals. They're just these old dudes that were in AA and I guess they got like really good at teaching people the steps and so they would get invited to do this. The Joe and Charlie app is just recordings and it's little chunks at a time of Joe and Charlie explaining the history of aa and then also it goes through each step. And I don't know, I might not be the most objective person because I just love listening to them. They're old Southern dudes. They tell stories. They have metaphors that just like make it so simple. They take this really complex information that seems like it's kind of like nebulous or whatever and bring it down into some sort of like totally understandable Southern short story metaphor kind of way. I usually say anytime I listen to Joe and Charlie, I will be a better person for at least three hours after the fact. I just feel better. It's like a dose of medicine for me almost. Another app I like a lot is called the 11th Step app. Actually, if you don't know what the 11th Step is, it's actually the step where you keep inventory. So it makes you keep a daily look at your actions and your behaviors and your thoughts and you rate yourself. And the really cool thing about this is after you do it for a while, you'll get like an average in there. It'll start to track where you usually are on things. And if something makes a really big change, either jumps way up or jumps lower, then it'll alert you that, hey, this could be a reps warning sign. Like, pay attention to this. There's lots of other recovery apps out there. Check it out. You got room for all those games on your phone. You got room for recovery app. And there's no excuse to say, I don't have time to do this, I don't have time to go to meetings or any of that stuff. It's super easy. I call it recovery to go put the apps on your phone.
