Your physical nutrition is just as important as your spiritual. When suffering from alcohol or substance use disorder, your body takes a toll that may affect you short or long term. Part of your recovery from either of these disorders is about regaining or practicing new physical health goals and bettering your body. Physical exercise is daunting, especially when coming to terms with these diseases. How you practice it, however, will help propel you forward on your path of recovery.
Whether you choose to pick up a recreational team sport, or something more independent like running, both have benefits. Successfully beginning an exercise program depends on whether you enjoy what you are doing or not. On the flipside, meditating, which is much more passive, provides you with a moment of reflection and helps set your day on the right path.
The Effects of Alcohol and Substance Use on Your Mental State
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) and substance use disorder (SUD) affect your mental state. How, though? Alcohol itself acts as a depressant. Consuming alcohol in large quantities might cause depression during and after you regain a sober state of mind. For instance, an example of the latter is part of what you feel the day after binge drinking, commonly referred to as a hangover.
Furthermore, if you drink large quantities of alcohol for long periods of time, achieving sobriety can prove more difficult. Your brain has chemically adjusted to the alcohol intake, thus causing mental stress in the form of altered behavior. Temporary feelings of fatigue and aggression are common during this stage of withdrawal.
Additionally, headaches are a physical manifestation of your brain readjusting to life without alcohol. Furthermore, prolonged heavy use of alcohol is dangerous. Severe medical conditions arise with respect to alcohol abuse, such as liver and heart damage.
SUD has much of the same effect on your brain and mental state as AUD. Depending on which substances are used, there is a good chance you may experience prolonged depressive episodes and possibly have an underlying mental health issue, as stated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), such as:
- Schizophrenia
- Anxiety
- Impulse-control disorder
- Mood disorders
Seeking help is difficult when either under the influence of alcohol or substances. Consider this as the addictive aspect of both. Combining this with the reality that alcohol and substance use disorders can cause significant mental distress, the idea of practicing positive mental health techniques such as meditation becomes that much more critical.
Practicing Mental Wellness During Recovery
Suffering from alcohol or substance use disorder is exhausting to your mental well-being. Practicing positive mental wellness techniques in your recovery is imperative to restore the part of yourself feeling drained due to your disease.
What are ways in which you can attain good mental wellness? Positive mental health techniques include constructive behaviors like:
- Starting or getting back into a hobby
- Being mindful of cravings or triggers
- Processing your feelings through journaling
- Reducing stress by maintaining a routine
- Getting regular sleep
- Taking time to relax each day
Practicing positive mental wellness is possible with many more techniques. These methods include meditation, physical exercise, and nutrition. We will discuss these techniques in later portions of this article.
Practicing mental wellness during recovery is positive and leads to building and nurturing stronger, healthier relationships with others. These relationships can ease your mind of past trauma caused by alcohol or substance use disorder while distancing yourself from your past behaviors and gaining new, positive coping skills.
Living a Healthier, Longer Life in Recovery
We discussed it briefly above; however, we want to reiterate that your health is at stake. When suffering from alcohol or substance use disorder, your life span is, in all reality, potentially suffering. As dark as that sounds, many of the effects produced by alcohol and other substances are treatable and not long-term. However, achieving sobriety is no easy task. There are many avenues you can choose to enter into recovery. Additionally, most of these include making changes for the better in terms of mental and physical well-being. The sooner you decide to remain abstinent from alcohol and substances, the closer you are to a healthier life.
Making that decision is difficult, of course. Getting to that point of surrender is rarely an easy one. It is common for those with alcohol or substance use disorder to hit a “rock-bottom” before acknowledging their disease. In fact, in most cases, an individual needs to experience “rock-bottom” before they make a change. Seeking help can occur at any point in life, and treatment programs, therapy, and long-term facilities help people on their journey.
Living a healthier, longer life allows for a celebration of leaving your old habits behind and freeing yourself from the shackles of alcohol or substance use disorder.
Create a Nutrition Plan to Succeed in Recovery
While experiencing alcohol or substance use disorder, your body took toxins and poisons that deteriorated your physical wellbeing. Now is the time to launch a counterattack that includes a physical wellbeing makeover. Creating a health plan that focuses on good nutritional value from foods in your diet is key.
How does a nutrition plan help you in recovery? We discussed how alcohol and substances negatively impact your mental and physical health. By merely abstaining from consuming one or the other, you cleanse yourself of those toxins and poisons. However, what drove you to begin drinking or using in the first place? One of the answers to that question includes poor mental health in part due to poor diet. A poor diet negatively affects your mood, energy, memory, and immune system, compromising your body’s ability to fight off infection and disease. Therefore, a good diet consisting of nutritionally rich foods benefits you and your body.
How, then, do you ensure your diet is nutritionally dense with healthy foods? It starts with routine and planning, of course! Maintaining a solid routine takes time and patience. Planning requires a bit of mental work that would be otherwise next to impossible while still suffering from alcohol or substance use disorder.
To make your nutrition plan, think about when and how often you eat throughout the day. Do you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or do you skip a meal? Do you eat snacks throughout the day? Do you supplement any meals or snacks by eating out? There are plenty of more questions to ask when considering your nutrition plan; however, focus on those easy ones. Once you have an answer to those questions, begin thinking about what foods you enjoy. Part of maintaining your nutrition plan is consistency. Keeping consistent with what you eat is much easier and simpler when you are not out of your comfort zone.
Discussing this even further, most food by itself is not unhealthy. What is unhealthy is overconsumption. This occurs when you go beyond recommended nutritional intake, such as your daily caloric range, fat, and sodium levels. We bring this up because you might love foods traditionally thought of as “unhealthy.” Portion control and understanding the nutritional value of the foods you eat are key to building your nutrition plan.
Finding success in your recovery comes not only from stopping alcohol consumption or using substances. It comes from the good behaviors you adopt, including the food you eat. Sobriety is a lifestyle change that is difficult to start. Adopting these good behaviors makes it easier on your physical self and mental well-being.
Exercise and Recovery: Sprinting to Sobriety
Perhaps sprinting is not the best way to describe building an excellent physical exercise routine for yourself while in recovery from alcohol or substance use disorder. Instead, let’s call it a marathon. Exercising requires time, energy, and effort – lots of it if you want it to be productive. It is a marathon you will eventually want to join when seeking sobriety. As listed by MedlinePlus, the positive impact exercise provides your physical and mental health include:
- Help to control your weight
- Reduce your risk of heart disease
- Help to manage blood sugar levels
- Help you quit smoking
- Improve your mental health and mood
- Help keep your thinking and judgment skills sharp
- Strengthen your bones and muscles
- Reduce your risk of some cancers
- Reduce your risk of falls
- Improve your sleep
- Improve your sexual health
- Increase your chances of living longer
Now that we have talked about why physical exercise is beneficial to your recovery from alcohol or substance use disorder, let us briefly discuss how to effectively begin exercising, as well as how to stick with it for the long run. Lucky for you, the process of both is similar to making yourself a nutrition plan. To be successful in your newfound passion for exercise, you need to find enjoyable activities to stick with your new routine for the long term. When we discuss picking up exercise, to some, the idea is daunting due to the commitment. However, ask yourself: What would make that kind of commitment something worthwhile to you?
Our answer is that physical exercise can take any form you like. Do you enjoy team sports? If so, find yourself a team to play on or meet up with friends and play in the park. Do you enjoy running? Well, you can run just about anywhere. What about swimming? Most gyms include a pool, and memberships have never been cheaper. You can also explore new activities when routines get boring or unchallenging.
Exercise, like nutrition, is what you make of it. In turn, both will tremendously impact your physical and mental health during recovery.
Here at Real Recovery, we want your recovery to go as smoothly as possible. To provide you with that environment, we highly encourage physical exercise as well as mental well-being. Our community works together to celebrate our sobriety as one. When you can rely on the person next to you, you know you are in a good place. We know that your alcohol or substance use disorder is not the be-all and end-all. With the help of a support system, such as family, friends, your sponsor, and a program that provides you with the resources you need, sobriety is a short distance away.
Since community plays such a large role in your recovery, why should it exclude those who also wish to help you with your physical and mental well-being? Prove to yourself and to those closest to you that you have what it takes to start your life over. Call us at (727) 290-9156.
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Know why physical stimuli like exercise and meditation are important to your recovery and how to include them in your routine. (727) 290-9156 to learn more.
