Continuously Seeking Guidance Through Meditation And Prayer
Aside from taking constant inventory and examining your thoughts and emotions, it is essential that you seek guidance through regular meditation and prayer to overcome your shortcomings.
This step encourages you to meditate and pray regularly to help you with clear thinking and stopping any negative thoughts and urges from leading you towards your addiction again.
It is recommended that you offer gratitude and practice meditation for a few minutes every day to maintain your resolve of eliminating porn addiction from your life completely.
Reaching Out And Helping Others
This step encourages you to reach out to other porn addicts and share the effective steps and tactics that you employed to get rid of your addiction.
It is your time to give back, and to aid the struggles of porn addicts.
This will also work as a reminder for you about why you cant go back to your former life and why you made the decision to opt for this path of recovery.
Think About The Consequences
Reminding yourself of what the consequences will be if you do indulge in alcohol cravings can help you resist the urge to drink as well. Continuing to misuse alcohol can weaken your mental health, making you more susceptible to anxiety and depression. Giving in to alcohol cravings might also cause you to reopen wounds youve been trying to mend with friends and family. So when the urge to drink is strong, ask yourself if drinking just this one time is worth everything and everyone you could potentially lose.
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Remind Yourself Of Reasons For Making A Change
Remembering the purpose behind your sobriety is another simple but effective way to fight alcohol cravings. You can keep a list of your top reasons in your wallet or purse or on your phone or email for easy access. But you need to have these reasons near and dear to your heart and mind at all times, especially when the urge to drink arises. Keeping these reasons in mind can also help you evaluate the negative consequences of drinking. Having that drink could cause you to lose your family, job, identity, sense of purpose, and self-worth. Remembering your reasons for change and having something to lose can help you resist cravings and stay on the right track.
Finding The Right Support And Guidance
Coping with drug addiction and cravings shouldnt be done alone. Having the right support group and guidance goes a long way toward a successful rehabilitation. Although it may have negatively impacted your life before, remember that your addiction is an opportunity to turn your life around.
Coping skills for addiction can only get you so far if you are alone. While battling your addiction, its best to turn to your family first and foremost. Families play a significant role in recovery. They are the ones closest to you and can be a source of strength in troubling times.
They can coordinate with your medical professionals to help you understand your situation and carry those learnings home. You can also consider family therapy sessions to determine if any of your past experiences or family history may have contributed to your problem and solve it together.
Its important to rely on your family, but dont forget to manage your expectations as they can only know so much about your situation. When you feel like no one at home can understand you, you can turn to a psychological expert to help process your feelings and give you helpful insight from an outside perspective.
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Tips For Finding The Best Drug Addiction Treatment For You
Remember that no treatment works for everyone. Everyones needs are different. Whether you have a problem with illegal or prescription drugs, addiction treatment should be customized to your unique situation. Its important that you find a program that feels right.
Treatment should address more than just your drug abuse. Addiction affects your whole life, including your relationships, career, health, and psychological well-being. Treatment success depends on developing a new way of living and addressing the reasons why you turned to drugs in the first place. For example, your drug dependency may have developed from a desire to manage pain or to cope with stress, in which case youll need to find a healthier way to relieve pain or to handle stressful situations.
Commitment and follow-through are key. Drug addiction treatment is not a quick and easy process. In general, the longer and more intense the drug use, the longer and more intense the treatment youll need. And in all cases, long-term follow-up care is crucial to recovery.
There are many places to turn for help. Not everybody requires medically supervised detox or an extended stint in rehab. The care you need depends on a variety of factors, including your age, drug-use history, medical or psychiatric conditions. In addition to doctors and psychologists, many clergy members, social workers, and counselors offer addiction treatment services.
Opioid Dependence Medical Management
Opioid addiction, like alcohol abuse, induces chemical changes in the brain and disrupts normal reward pathways. Opioids include both illegal medications such as heroin and prescription opioids such as Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet, and morphine.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription medication addiction has garnered considerable attention in the United States, with drug abuse becoming the leading cause of injury mortality in 2012, with 51.8 per cent of overdose deaths involving pharmaceuticals and 71.3 per cent of fatal pharmaceutical overdoses involving opioid analgesics.
These medications are highly addictive, and withdrawal symptoms can be painful on both a physical and emotional level. Several medications for addictions have been licensed to help with withdrawal symptoms and cravings and help with detox and long-term maintenance therapy.
These Include:
- Naltrexone
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How Can You Fight Alcohol Cravings
Alcohol cravings can happen any time, day or night. At first, the urge to drink may seem uncontrollable, overwhelming, and too powerful to resist. But in reality, most alcohol cravings are like the waves in the ocean: they appear to be sudden but are actually predictable and short-lived. This means that you can learn to see a craving forming and can fight the urge to drink by riding the wave with techniques and lifestyle practices designed to help you overcome alcohol cravings. Understanding why cravings happen, knowing your triggers, maintaining a busy schedule, countering the urges, thinking about the consequences, and remembering your reasons for sobriety can all help you fight alcohol cravings.
Take All Forms Of Media Seriously
Dont think to yourself that TV shows or movies that emphasize sexual situations or portray women in the wrong light are harmless. Even if they are not considered porn, they are damaging. If youre struggling with pornography, these types of entertainment will only make your struggle more difficult.
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Admitting Your Powerlessness Over Porn Addiction
In the first step, you have to admit that you are powerless over your addiction, that your life has been so affected that you have lost complete control. Your addiction has started to harm your relationships, career, and overall health.
The good thing is that the minute you start thinking, I need help for porn addiction, you have already taken a major step.
To strengthen your commitment, it is recommended that you take a powerlessness inventory. Write down all the ways porn addiction has affected your life. Add examples of the harm it has caused you and how you have harmed others.
This can even be an ongoing process throughout your recovery as revisiting the fact that you are powerless over this addiction would work as a motivation for you to strive harder to get that control back over your life.
Rewards: Weighing The Costs And Benefits Of Addiction
If motivation is the force that drives you to act, then rewards are what you gain from that activity. People quit their addictions when they begin to get more rewards for living without the addiction than they got from feeding the addiction. Put into economic terms, you give up your habit when you believe that its costs exceed its benefits.Of course, the nature of rewards is highly subjective. You incur all sorts of costs from an addictionhealth, financial, legal, interpersonal, and so on. However, you also are getting benefits from itrewards that often loom larger than life because they are so immediate and familiar to you.
4.1. The Rewards of Addictions
Excessive alcohol consumption, eating, and sexual activity etc provide you with feelings and sensations that you desire and need. Some of these essential feelings are a sense of being valued, of being a worthwhile person, or of being in control. It is critical for you, or anyone trying to help a person with an addictive problem, to understand the needs that the addiction fulfills. This understanding is necessary in order to root out the addiction.
However, addictions dont really provide people with positive experiences or benefits. Although they provide short-term or illusory rewards, addictions ultimately lead to negative feelings and life outcomes. In the long run, you are worse off as a result of your addictive behaviors.
4.2. Are Addictions Pleasurable?
4.3. The Rewards of Work and Family
Procrastination
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Believing The Higher Power Will Eliminate Your Character Defects
Next, you must have strong belief that the higher power will eliminate your character defects to break your porn addiction.
Again, you can create a list of your character defects or utilize the same list you made earlier. Beside the character defect you want to remove, add in a positive character trait that you would want to adapt.
As you make the list, your resolve will strengthen when you evaluate all the negatives in your character. It will help you stay motivated and give you a list of positive character traits that you want to work for.
Values: Building On Your Values Foundation
Values play a critical role in addictionand your values are likely to be the key to beat addiction. This is a matter of both considering what your values are and sometimes refocusing on dormant values or even developing new ones.
When you can truly experience how a habit is damaging what is most important to you, the stepping-stones away from your destructive habit often fall readily into place.
2.1. What Are Values? Do they really matter?
Your values are your beliefs that some things are right and good and others wrong and bad, that some things are more important than others, and that one way of doing things is better than another. Values are usually deeply heldthey come from your earliest learning and background. Values reflect what your parents taught you, what you learned in school and religious institutions, and what the social and cultural groups you belong to hold to be true and right.
Many people find that alcohol is tremendously relaxing, sexually exhilarating, or provides some other powerful, welcome feelingbut they do not become alcoholics. They simply refuse to go there. Have you ever heard someone say, I know that when I have more than one drink, I throw all caution to the wind? Most people who react so violently to alcohol say, Thats why I limit myself to a single drink or Thats why I dont drink. But those addicted to alcohol regularly override this realization about their reactions to alcohol and continue to drink.
2.3. Returning to my Uncle Ozzie
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When Recovering From An Addiction Managing Cravings Isnt Easy Here We Share Six Key Tips To Help You Through These Unique Challenges
Its normal for anyone who has an addictive behaviour to experience cravings, but that doesnt make them any less frustrating. During the initial stages of recovery, they can be intense, but over time, and with perseverance, they will subside.
Cravings can be both physical and psychological in nature, and are generally most intense during the withdrawal period. The brain will work overtime, and may come up with all sorts of excuses like: This will be the last time. As for how long cravings will last, it isnt possible to put a timeframe on that, but the key thing to remember is that they are not permanent.
If not handled properly, cravings can lead to a relapse, so the most important thing is to know your triggers and to learn strategies for dealing with them. Here are six tips to help you manage cravings and urges.
Awareness Is The First Step
Being aware of your addiction, urge, and craving for drugs and wanting to make a change is the first important step to recovery. Once you make such a decision, you can then set goals for how to achieve that change and sustain it without relapsing or falling for the temptation of urges and cravings.
This might involve developing new habits such as exercising or taking up a new hobby. Your habits influence your choices, and once you are in the habit of using drugs, its not easy to stop, even after being in rehab. The important thing is to never give up, even if you do relapse.
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Craving Symptoms And Treatments For Specific Drugs
If you need help managing your drug cravings or overcoming an addiction, contact a treatment program specialist today at
The specific characteristics of cravings and the treatment for them can vary based on the drug. Below youll find links to pages with more information about cravings for specific drugs.
Onset of Cravings
Onset and duration of cravings can vary depending on the substance abused. For example:
- Crystal meth cravings can begin anywhere from a few hours to a few days after the last dose but can then last for years due to alterations in brain structure and function believed to be caused by persistent, heavy use. 1, 2
- The onset of prescription opioid cravings will depend on whether the drug is short- or long-acting. Short-acting opioids can cause cravings as soon as 6-12 hours after the last dose. Cravings for long-acting opioids may not begin until about 2-4 days after the most recent dose. 1 Cravings for opioid painkillers can last for weeks to months. 1
Icipate In Relapse Prevention Therapy
There are many 12 step and non-12 step alternatives where people in recovery from drugs and alcohol can learn the necessary skills to avoid relapses.
SMART Recovery is a non-religious cross-talk therapy where people can discuss their struggles with triggers and cravings, as well as listen and learn from the experiences of others.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is another incredibly useful tool that develops a positive skillset in recovery and helps people understand the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
The most important thing to remember is that recovery from addiction takes time and relapse is a natural part of the disease, just as experiencing triggers or cravings are a normal part of recovery.
Instead of feeling guilty or depressed, staying focused and positive can lead to a happy and healthy sober lifestyle.
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About Checkup & Choices
CheckUp & Choices is a confidential, self-guided, online program that is clinically proven to help SMART Recovery participants. The CheckUp includes a comprehensive alcohol self-assessment. The Choices programs include 12+ weeks of ongoing motivational exercises drink, mood and urge trackers guided emails and change plans. With Checkup & Choices, you are never labeled, and you will be treated with respect and without judgment. Get started with CheckUp & Choices today.
Principles Of Effective Treatment
The Following Main Concepts, Which Have Been Based on Empirical Evidence Since the Mid-1970s, Should Form the Foundation of Every Successful Treatment Program:
- Addiction is a disorder that affects brain function and actions. It is a complex but treatable disease.
- There is no single treatment that is suitable for all.
- People need urgent access to care.
- Effective care considers all of the patients needs, not just their substance use.
- It is essential to stay in care for a sufficient amount of time.
- The most popular types of therapy are counseling and other behavioral treatments.
- Medications are often used in conjunction with behavioral treatments and are an integral component of recovery.
- Treatment plans must be revised and updated regularly to meet the patients changing needs.
- Other suspected psychiatric conditions should be treated during therapy.
- Detoxification with medical aid is just the first step of treatment.
- Treatment doesnt need to be voluntary in order to be successful.
- The use of drugs during treatment must be closely controlled at all times.
- Patients should be screened for HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases and trained on how to reduce their risk of contracting these illnesses.
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Ride Out The Urge Without Giving In
Avoiding and resisting the urge to drink isnt the only way to effectively manage alcohol cravings. You can also ride out the urge without succumbing to the craving. You can accept the cravings as normal and temporary and fight the urge to drink by urge surfing.
Urge Surfing, a mindfulness technique created by psychologist Dr. Alan Marlatt believes that most urges are like waves, rising in intensity, peaking, and then crashing.
The skill takes practice, but you can urge surf in 5 simple steps, including:
