One of the greatest challenges of recovery is maintaining your motivation in the face of a never-ending challenge. It takes work, and some days you just may not feel like doing it. Here are some tips to recharge what motivated you to get sober and into recovery in the first place and help you prevent relapse. Sobriety is a long-term process, and the longer you go without relapse, the easier it gets—but it’s a never-ending journey.
Find a Life Coach
No, we don’t mean to hire Tony Robbins for a motivational speech! You can find a sponsor at your local AA meeting or someone who is also going through recovery who can help guide you. Even if you don’t have a sponsor, hearing other people’s stories of trials and overcoming obstacles in recovery can inspire you to keep going. Some days, that’s all you need to get through the day.
Set Achievable Goals
When you set goals that are achievable and gain those little successes, it motivates you to keep going and work on your other goals in recovery. If you set goals too high and can never attain them, it’s easy to lose motivation and feel like a failure. Give yourself a sense of success and achievement by setting small goals that you can attain as part of your progress. You can set a few bigger goals that are harder to obtain but make sure to break them down into a series of smaller, more manageable goals.
Connect With Your Community
It’s important to connect with people who are in recovery and help support you, but it’s also motivating to connect with the greater community in service for the greater good. Helping others also builds our self-esteem, giving us a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. It’s a great feeling at the end of the day when you helped a homeless person get a meal at a soup kitchen or volunteered for a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. Helping others and having other people count on you can help your recovery. You could even consider being a sponsor to someone else after you’ve been sober for at least a year.
Connect or Reconnect With Your Higher Power
Whatever your religion or sense of spirituality, reconnecting and recommitting to a spiritual practice of any kind is a great motivator. It acts as a daily reminder of how important your recovery is to you and the people you care about. It can offer valuable time for quiet and reflection to help you process the day’s events and gain a healthier perspective on the challenges you face.
Have an Attitude of Gratitude
Sometimes we start to take for granted the good things in our lives, especially right now with a global pandemic. Taking the time to sit down and make a list of all the things we are grateful for can be a powerful motivator to keep the positive things happening in our lives. It sounds like a simple exercise but can be a huge motivator to keep a positive mindset, even when we’re faced with challenges all around us.
Take Time for Yourself
The term “self-care” gets thrown around a lot. But what does it mean? Ideally, self-care is an activity that fills your soul and inspires you. Maybe it is taking a course online, drawing or painting, or tinkering with technology. Self-care, in the best of circumstances, focuses on something that rejuvenates you and fills your soul. It could be as simple as taking a walk in nature on a beautiful day.
Positive Visualization
Some people are good at creating positive images in their minds. Some people like to create a vision board that can be a collage of things that motivate them personally. You can take your thoughts and your aspirations and put them into pictorial form. You can create a physical board that you post in your house in a place where you see it every day, or you can create a screensaver or background on your computer that reflects your goals. Either way, it’s a visual reminder of some of the things you want to achieve and the motivator to get things done.
Keep Your Expectations Realistic
Don’t set your goals so high they are impossible, or nearly impossible, to achieve. Everybody wants to feel like a success at times or like they’ve achieved something remarkable. Recovery is no different. Give yourself small rewards when you achieve something. It doesn’t have to be elaborate to still hold meaning and keep you motivated.
It’s hard to stay motivated in the never-ending process of recovery. Each person has to find what motivates them to keep achieving their goals and avoid relapse. Some of the best motivators are getting involved in the community and effective goal-setting, making sure that the goals are reasonable and achievable. This can boost your sense of self-esteem and keep you going through challenging times. Reaching out for help–and offering help–can give our lives meaning and purpose. At Everlast Recovery Centers, we understand how challenging the recovery process can be at times. We help give you the tools you’ll need to navigate the process and even provide aftercare to our detoxification and rehabilitation programs. We help you build skills to help you cope and maintain sobriety, such as yoga or art therapy to maintain sobriety. Our professional staff in our homelike atmosphere will help you find the techniques that work for you and help you start a new life at our Riverside, California, facility. Call us today at (866) 338-6925.
