You might be shocked to learn that illegal drugs cost the U.S. about $110 billion each year. Yet the real cost may be the future of this country. It’s difficult to build a prosperous nation when a growing number of its citizens are wrestling with the many debilitating effects of drug and alcohol addiction.
If you suffer from an addiction, you have to realize that it does more than ruin your health, finances, and relationships. It also negatively impacts your moods and compromises your motivation. You slowly lose the will to live a happy life. According to one Arizona drug rehab program, “Often addiction is accompanied by occurring emotional disorders such as anxiety, depression and bi-polar.”
Restore Your Will Power
In most cases, if you have an addiction, you should seek addiction treatment. Working with counselors at a drug rehab center will strengthen your will to quit the addictive habits that are ruining your life. However, you can also use out-of-the-box treatments to recover from addiction. With that in mind, let’s look at some ways to work with nature to speed recovery.
Discover Peace of Mind
How do you rebuild your strength of mind and spirit to reduce cravings and prevent any relapses?
For thousands of years, the practice of mindful meditation has been used in Asia to help people restore their sense of balance. Today, counselors advocate practicing mindfulness as the most powerful tool you can use to prevent relapse.
When you become aware of what you’re doing while suspending judgment on your thoughts and feelings, something miraculous happens—you lower cortisol, the stress hormone, and you increase interleukin, a compound in the immune system that detoxifies harmful chemicals. The effect of these physiological changes neurotransmission activity in your brain and alters your mood.
There are many types of mindfulness meditations. One popular form is Vipassana meditation, which teaches you to view negative thoughts and feelings with detachment.
Rejuvenate Your Health
Rejuvenating your health is all about rebuilding your body. When you’re healthy, you’re able to think clearly and make positive life choices. You’re also far less likely to crave things that compromise your state of well-being.
There are four simple, but powerful ways to rejuvenate your mind and body: improve sleep patterns, restore hydration, eat nutritious foods, and exercise. Let’s take a look at each one in turn.
- Improve sleep patterns.
Insufficient sleep or too much sleep can wreck your moods and cloud your thinking. You find yourself crabby for no apparent reason. Quality sleep can sometimes elude you when you’re dealing with major life stressors.
Here are some recommendations from the Mayo Clinic on how to improve sleep patterns:
- · Create and stick to a sleep schedule so your body knows when to feel sleepy.
- · Pay attention to your last meal of the day as either hunger or overeating can make you restless at night.
- · Create a ritual to wind down at night like taking a hot bath, reading a good book or listening to calming music.
- · Make your bedroom and your bed as comfortable as possible to induce a feeling of peace and calm.
- Restore normal hydration levels.
Most people are dehydrated and don’t even know it. They rely on a sense of thirst to inform them when they should drink some water. In actuality, thirst is a warning sign. It’s a little like the red light that shows up in your car when engine oil levels are at a dangerously low level. And just as engine oil is essential to keep your engine running, water is essential to maintaining your metabolic processes.
Many health issues like aching joints, muscular inflammation, constipation, brain fog, and sluggishness will go away when you’re sufficiently hydrated. One rule of thumb is to drink half your body weight in ounces. So if you weigh 160 lbs, you should drink at least 80 ounces of water. To remedy dehydration, there are various treatment that can help such as Drip Hydration Therapy.
- Eat nutritious foods.
Nutritious foods don’t taste as good as unhealthy foods rich in salt, fat, and sugar. Your taste buds prefer a tub of ice cream over a plate of kale. But kale is a methyl donor that will improve your epigenetics, while ice cream will do you more harm than good.
Make a list of the best sources of protein, complex carbs, vegetables, healthy fats, condiments, and supplements and slowly add these to your diet. If you persist long enough, your craving for tasty comfort foods will diminish and you’ll prefer nutritious meals.
- Exercise.
All forms of exercise can improve your life—yoga for flexibility, aerobics for cardiovascular health, or calisthenics to burn fat and build muscle.
Even a small dose of daily exercise is good for you, and here are some good reasons to exercise:
- · It will boost your mood, increasing endorphins.
- · Your endocrine system, pulmonary, and cardiovascular system will work much better.
- · You’ll build muscle and burn fat.
- · You’ll experience many cognitive benefits, including growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus (a process called neurogenesis).
A Caveat
While out-of-the box treatments can work on their own, you have to be disciplined enough to practice them consistently. It’s more realistic to use them in conjunction with an intensive outpatient program rather than as a standalone solution. When used in this way, they can speed up the recovery process by rebuilding your mind, body, and spirit.
