When you are struggling with addiction, your life is torn apart. Addiction creates a pattern of living life in crisis. Instead of moving forward, you are usually focused solely on surviving to the next day. While dealing with addiction, you may put your entire existence on the backburner while substance use takes over every decision you make.
You might not know the life skills needed to be a functioning member of society, or you may have put those skills aside. However, it’s not too late to learn and practice new skills.
Once you leave treatment, you are given a rare opportunity to rebuild your life. You have a clean slate. You can start fresh and move past just focusing on survival. You don’t have to live that way anymore. Now, instead of just existing, it’s time to truly live.
Thriving Instead of Just Surviving
In order to move past surviving, you need to learn how to navigate life in a way that cultivates stability, structure, safety, and resilience.
You need to know how to get through the complex parts of life without everything falling apart. Early recovery often involves learning or re-learning valuable life skills that can help you feel more in control of your life.
Rebuilding Your Skill Set
To make a safe and successful transition from treatment to the real world, you’re going to need to learn the skills necessary to be an independent person. You might have learned some skills in treatment, such as how to cook, clean, stay physically fit, and name your emotions.
However, three months of residential treatment isn’t enough to master these skills. There’s still a lot more to learn and more to put into practice once you’re on your own.
Types of Skills You Need to Learn
Essential life skills are something that you may have neglected while in addiction. It is never too late to learn and continue to improve these skills.
Nutrition and Fitness
To be a healthy person, you need to take care of your body. While struggling with addiction, you may not have eaten healthy foods or exercised. You might have overeaten or undereaten. Substances destroyed your body, but you’re healing that damage in recovery. Eating well and exercising can assist with healing.
If you don’t have much knowledge about nutrition and physical fitness, now is the time to learn. You might have been introduced to this while in treatment. Your program probably taught you ways to stay physically active, and you might have learned some information about foods that are good for your body. However, at that time, you had someone assisting and supervising you. You’ll need to learn how to practice healthy habits on your own now that you are out of residential treatment.
Out of every life skill you’ll need to learn, physical fitness and nutrition take enormous self-discipline and self-control. You might be tempted to eat junk food or stay on the couch all day, but nothing about that will help you heal. The discipline you learn from taking care of your body can transfer over to the discipline needed to stay sober. If you are able to control putting junk food in your body, you can do the same with other substances.
Domestic Living
As an adult, you should know how to cook meals for yourself as well as how to practice basic housekeeping. It doesn’t matter what gender you are. You are responsible for the state of your home and knowing how to feed yourself.
You might overlook these skills, but they are essential to learn. Learning how to cook lets you have control over what you put in your body. Learning how to clean your house can make your environment healthier and more organized. A clean place makes a person feel a lot better than a dirty one.
In recovery, you can learn these skills by including them in your daily routine. Cook for yourself every day, or cook with your family. Create a list of chores that need to be done often and put aside time to complete them. Learning these skills teaches you personal accountability, as well as discipline, allowing you to be a more independent person.
Emotional Awareness
Having a deep understanding of your emotions is an important skill because it allows you to know where your thoughts and actions are coming from. If you acknowledge how something made you feel, you can come to a better understanding of your situation. Being more aware of your emotions can also help you understand and control them. Instead of ignoring or rejecting your emotions, sit with them and name them.
Emotional awareness gives your control over your feelings. It’s especially important to be emotionally aware if you have poor mental health. It’s common for people to use substances as a way to avoid their emotions, but if you ignore them for too long, they will only get worse.
Being aware of your emotions can also help you understand if something is wrong or if a need is being neglected. If you’re in a poor mood, you can take a step back and look at what’s wrong. What’s not being taken care of? What could be better?
Healthy Coping Mechanisms
Knowing how to deal with difficult situations in a healthy way is essential to sobriety. Before, you may have used substances as a way to cope when life got too difficult. Instead of turning to substance use, learn healthier ways to handle things when they get too hard.
One important skill is stress management. This might include practicing yoga as a way to unwind, learning breathing exercises, or meditating as a way to clear your thoughts. Another skill to learn is knowing when to ask for help.
You might put off asking for help until before you know it, you’re in over your head. If you’re an independent person or a person who is afraid of being a burden to others, you may have trouble asking for help. Consider starting out by asking for help with small things. Every little bit can lighten the load.
Socializing Effectively
You’ll need to learn interpersonal skills if you want stable and strong relationships. Addiction has a way of destroying relationships. You might have friends and family that resent how you acted before treatment.
You might not know how to handle difficult conversations or have a habit of saying the wrong thing. In recovery, take the time to learn how to effectively talk to people and form authentic relationships.
Skills that fall under this category include personal accountability, active listening, boundary-setting, conflict resolution, and productive communication. Holding yourself accountable for your actions can be a difficult skill because it’s hard to own your mistakes.
However, admitting your wrongs is essential to repairing relationships. Setting boundaries and respecting boundaries keep your relationships healthy and safe by having strong expectations right off the bat.
Financial and Career
Money is often a source of a lot of problems for people. Learning financial skills can help. These skills include money management, building good credit, and getting out of debt.
If you’re unemployed, it can include the skills that can get you a job, such as learning how to effectively interview, write a cover letter, and build a strong resume. Financial and career skills are essential to survival and allow you to move forward in life and meet your personal milestones.
Creative Problem Solving
It’s easy to become frustrated or overwhelmed when you need to confront obstacles. Sometimes life throws you curveballs, and you need to know how to adapt. Not everything needs to be a crisis.
Some things require patience and creative solutions. Creative problem solving can help you navigate through obstacles that get in the way of progress. Thinking outside of the box is sometimes necessary, especially if typical solutions aren’t working.
Ways to Harness Skills
You may understand what skills you want to master. However, it is difficult to transition from desiring a skill to mastering it unless you have a plan. You may not know how to learn a skill. Finding help in the form of classes and changing your routine may be what you need.
Take a Class
Not every skill can be learned on your own. Sometimes you need an expert. If there’s a particular skill that you want to get good at, consider taking a class. There are classes for just about everything.
If you want to get better at physical fitness, look into classes offered at your local gym. Maybe you want to get better at cooking. There might be a cooking class that can teach you skills beyond the basics.
Classes can also be a great idea if you want to learn a skill necessary for a career. Getting a degree or a certification can open plenty of doors for future jobs. Recovery is the perfect time to pursue education and branch out your skillset.
Create a Routine to Build Habits
The best way to learn a skill is repetition. You won’t learn physical fitness by only exercising once in a while. Building a routine provides you with structure and lets you build those habits over time. Think about things that you want to get better at. If it’s cooking, set aside time to prepare meals. If it’s exercise, add a workout regiment to your daily routine.
Set Goals for Learning New Skills
Another great way to learn skills is by challenging yourself. Define what improvement means to you. If you want to improve your money management skills, set a goal related to that. For example, you might set a goal to stick within your budget for an entire month. This could be a good goal if you aren’t great at handling money.
Goals for learning skills should be specific so that it’s clear to the goal is complete. There should also be a time frame required to complete each goal and each step of the goal. This gives you the motivation to complete it and lets you know when you can consider that goal completed.
Sober Living and Putting Skills to Practice
If you’ve just finished treatment, you may lack direction and not know what to do next. Switching from being completely monitored to being on your own can be overwhelming.
You haven’t had the time to practice the skills you learned in treatment and apply them to the real world. This can be scary and even dangerous especially if you don’t have a safety net. If you find yourself worried about this transitional period, you should consider entering a sober living home.
Sober living homes give you the support and structure you need to perfect those skills that allow you to be a functional and productive person. A sober living home often has sets of rules that are meant to keep you on track and keep everyone in the house safe.
In a sober living home, you can also learn important life skills with the help of others. Living with people who are in the same life stage as you create an environment where you and your housemates can work together to get better.
Life skills are the key to leaving a state of survival. When a person struggles with addiction, they find it hard to just live their life. The focus tends to be on getting through the day. After treatment, you enter a whole new world of possibilities. There are thousands of open doors and possibilities. Take advantage of this transitional period and rebuild your life from the ground up. There are plenty of ways to learn new skills that will set you up for success.
Real Recovery offers sober housing to people who are entering this transitional phase and need a safety net. If you need the time to get the foundation built, sober living is the best temporary solution. If you would like to learn more about life skills and the housing we offer, call Real Recovery today at (727) 290-9156.
