This is a good time to re-familiarize yourself with your favorite urge-busting tools. Check your handbook or the online toolbox and begin actively practicing these tools before you need them, to strengthen your urge-busting muscles. Include the tools that work best for you in your plan for dealing with those tempting holiday events if you choose not to avoid them. Look for ways to help in community kitchens or homeless shelters or with charities. You can also just help one person at a time, adding a goal to your recovery program to find someone each day to do an act of kindness.
Don’t Stop Here
Support systems also serve as safety nets during moments of crisis or when cravings arise. Whether it’s a quick call to a sponsor or joining a group therapy session, these resources sustain motivation and provide personalized coping strategies tailored to each person’s needs. Incorporating these strategies into your recovery plan can significantly reduce the impact of external triggers, supporting sustained sobriety and improved emotional well-being. Consistently following a structured routine that includes healthy activities reduces opportunities for exposure to external triggers. Engaging in hobbies, exercise, and social activities that promote wellness can decrease susceptibility. Reframing uncomfortable feelings plays a crucial role in disarming internal triggers.
- Navigating early reframing holidays in early recovery recovery during the holidays can be a challenge.
- Offer one simple compromise, such as arriving 30–60 minutes later to avoid early toasts, and set a clear departure time.
- The first year of sobriety brings a learning curve.
- For individuals in recovery, it means preparing for challenges, leaning on your community, and prioritizing your well-being.
Setting and Maintaining Boundaries
Read Kali’s story, Alone on Christmas, for strategies on how to cope when spending the holidays alone. Headaches, sluggishness or low energy, lack of mental clarity, and sugar cravings can all come from being dehydrated. Your cup of herbal tea, non-caffeinated drinks, or the fruits and vegetables you eat can all count towards your water content too. Here at BTG we talk about the importance of eating good sources of protein for our neurotransmitter health or mood repairing and stabilizing forces.
We’re here when you are ready to take your first steps toward recovery.
12-step programs create an environment that promotes emotional safety, where people have the experience of feeling understood Alcoholics Anonymous and accepted. Despite all the pain and aggravation that alcohol and drugs may have caused the recovering individual, giving them up can result in a powerful sense of loss. The first obstacle that often comes up is the holiday office party. I’ve worked with many people in recovery who tell me that coworkers can look at them as if they have a third eye, or as if they have just sprouted wings, if they decline an alcoholic beverage. Many have trouble just being around alcohol, not to mention the unchecked inebriation that can occur at these parties.
Readers are urged to seek professional help if they are struggling with a mental health condition or another health concern. Shutting down is the worst thing you can do in the face of a problem—whether you’re in addiction recovery or not. I reframing holidays in early recovery can’t think of a single instance in my life when isolating and pitying myself made anything better.
Maintaining Recovery during the Holiday Season
If you are worried about the upcoming holiday season and feel you need a higher level of support to protect your sobriety, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Contact Serenity at Summit New Jersey today for a confidential discussion about how we can assist you. The holidays do not have to be a time of fear or a test of endurance.
Whether this is your first day in recovery, your first holiday in recovery, or your twentieth, the moment you decide to begin treatment, you do not have to navigate it alone. What matters most is honoring your wellbeing and protecting the progress you’ve worked hard to build. It’s okay to remove yourself from environments that feel triggering or unsupportive—your recovery deserves that level of care.