How to Prevent Drug Addiction Relapse

Being addicted to drugs and alcohol to the point of substance abuse is a condition that you should definitely consider and treat as a disease. Addiction is a disease, after all. If you’re addicted to drugs, you should realize the trouble you’re in and then make the decision to stop using drugs. However, after addiction has set in, quitting drug usage is easier said than done. It takes practice, patience, and time to undo the damage of the substance you’re abusing.

What Is Addiction Relapse Anyway?

Like with any disease, such as hypertension and cancer, it’s possible to relapse. When an addict has reached their goal of sobriety starts using drugs again despite their efforts to quit, then that’s a relapse back to the original addiction disease. This doesn’t mean that their stint in rehab didn’t work or they’re a failure when it comes to recovering.

Instead, this simply means that the symptoms of their addiction disease has reappeared, thus necessitating aftercare adjustments and rehabilitation follow-ups in order to keep them on track towards recovery. Luckily, the previous rehabilitation program or treatment model serves as the foundation towards becoming healthy and addiction-free once more. 

The Most Common Triggers of Substance Abuse Relapse 

Here are the top ten most common triggers of substance abuse relapse in no particular order. 

1. Immediate Withdrawal Symptoms: Withdrawal symptoms from substance abuse commonly include physical weakness, nausea, and anxiety, among other symptoms.
2. Post-Acute Withdrawal Symptoms: These complications from quitting your addictive habits follow the initial symptoms, and they include poor sleep, mood swings, irritability, and anxiety.
3. Poor Self-Care:Because an addict is so preoccupied with their addiction and lack of discipline or impulse control, he tends to neglect himself, leading to reduced sleep, bad hygiene, poor eating habits, and stress mismanagement.
4. People: Your fair-weather or drug-dealer friends might cause you to relapse to substance abuse, especially if peer pressure has a hand at you ending up addicted in the first place.
5. Places or Environment:You might relapse if you’re near the places where you used to buy your drugs or get your supply of alcoholic drinks.
6. Things:The burnt spoons, needles, candles, glass cases, razor blades, bongs, or other tools you were using in order to get high might serve as mementos to your drug usage. 
7. Uncomfortable Emotions: You might feel tired, lonely, angry, hungry, or so forth, which can remind your drug-altered brain of the effects of these drugs in a Pavlovian or instinctual way.
8. Sex and Relationships:The strain in your relationship can be quite stressful if anything goes wrong and you start having an argument that digs up your drug-using past.
9. Isolation: When you’re alone, you usually end up with too much time to be with your own thoughts, which can lead you to have dark thoughts about your former addicted history.
10. Overconfidence or Pride:If you think you don’t have alcoholism or a drug problem, or if you believe your addiction is behind you even if it’s not, then your folly can lead to your relapse.

The Stages of Relapse and How to Deal with Each

Relapse isn’t an event but instead a process. Identifying when it’s happening can help tremendously in avoiding it from completing and undoing all your hard work when it comes to addiction recovery and sobriety. Relapse happens weeks or even months before the concluding physical relapse happens and you’re back to having a full-blown addiction.

You also need to know the specific prevention techniques when faced with the three stages of relapse. This will help you keep your relapse process from worsening to the point of drug usage. 

• Emotional Relapse: When undergoing the emotional relapse stage, you’re not thinking about using drugs. However, your feelings or emotions as well as behavior are setting you up towards future usage and relapse. With that said, the signs of emotional relapse include the following:

• • Anger
  • Anxiety
  • Isolation
  • Intolerance
  • Mood swings
  • Defensiveness
  • Poor sleep habits
  • Poor eating habits
  • Not asking for help
  • Not going to meetings 

The symptoms of post-acute withdrawal that was discussed above are also the same signs of emotional relapse. It’s easier to prevent relapse if you understand post-acute withdrawal. It’s during this early relapse stage when it’s easiest to pull back from your addiction tendencies. This stage of relapse usually comes immediately after rehab you just went through, so the treatment remains in recent memory.

It’s during the later stages of relapse that the pull of addiction becomes stronger and the sequence of events towards relapsing moves much faster. Preventing relapse at this stage necessitates recognizing that you’re emotional relapse, so you should change your behavior thusly.

At this stage, if you don’t change your behavior and let the whole process happen, you’ll become exhausted from living too long in the stage of emotional relapse. Your exhaustion can also lead to your defeat when it comes to your addiction battles, because it compels you to escape from your high-stress and tiring situation in the form of mental relapse. 

Remember the following: 

• • Ask for Help: Remind yourself to ask for help and recognize that you might be isolating yourself from others. Don’t be so prideful as to avoid asking for help. There’s no shame in it.

• • Avoid Isolation: Connect with people. Be willing to depend on others. If you find yourself in a situation of emotional relapse for far too long, mental relapse will follow, compelling you to start thinking about using drugs.

• • Lean to Relax: Become aware that you’re agitated and you should practice relaxation techniques to calm yourself down. Agitation, frustration, and stress can push you over the edge of mental relapse.

• • Let Go of Negative Feelings: Let go of your resentments and fears. You need to do so in order to fully relax. Don’t let these feelings fester from within you, thus making you uncomfortable in your own skin.

• • Practice Self-Care: Practice self-care and realize that your eating habits, hygiene, and sleep are slipping so that you can avoid giving into your fragile emotional state.

• • Don’t Give In to Carelessness: Poor sleep habits, lack of hygiene, and eating poorly can make it easier for your body to become exhausted, which in turn makes it long for escape from your situation.

• • Achieve Self-Awareness: Become aware of why you use drugs. Since you want to reward, relax, or escape with drug usage, then not taking care of yourself can create situations where you’re emotionally and mentally drained. 

• Mental Relapse: Unaddressed emotional turmoil and neglectful behavior from the emotional relapse stage can lead to mental relapse. It’s during this stage that you’ll feel like there’s a war going on with your mind or you’re going into battle against yourself. There’s part of yourself that wants to use drugs but there’s the recovered sober version of yourself that doesn’t want to restart the waking nightmare of drug addiction. 

During the early phases of this relapse stage, you’ll find yourself idly thinking about using drugs. In the later phases, drug usage might end up being the only thing in your mind, to the point that you’re compelled to act on this impulse. As the pull of your addiction becomes stronger, it becomes harder to make the right choices.

With that in mind, here are the behavioral signs of mental relapse:

• • Fantasizing about using
  • Thinking about relapsing
  • Glamorizing your past use
  • Hanging out with old using friends
  • Planning your relapse around other people’s schedules
  • Thinking about people, places, and things you used with
  • Lying to yourself about how you’ll be more in control this time around when you use drugs 

As for the techniques in dealing with your negative mental urges, here’s what you should do. The best way to combat the lies you’re telling yourself is to realize the truth behind them. In other words: 

• • Play the “Tape”Until the End: Play the videotape or digital video of the imaginary scenario of your relapsed drug usage all the way through, warts and all. When you think about using drugs, the main fantasy is that you’ll be able to control yourself and your usage this time.

• • Be Aware of the Delusion: The delusion that drug victims have over usage is akin to the abusive relationship a spouse might have for the husband or wife. The highs you get from drugs are so great that you ignore the dire consequences of using them.

• • One Dose Isn’t Enough: When taking drugs, one isn’t enough. It’s never enough. Imprint of engrave that fact into your mind. It’s like how one drink isn’t enough. One drink or one dose can lead to more drinks or doses.

• • A Vicious Cycle: Realize that taking one dose can lead to a vicious cycle, especially since already fallen through that slippery slope. Don’t let yourself wake up feeling disappointed and sorry for yourself.

• • Distract Yourself: When temptations come, occupy yourself with something constructive or positive. Get up and go for a walk. Go to a meeting. Call a friend. Paint a picture. Get a hobby. Make love to your partner or spouse. Don’t give your mental relapse any room for growth. 

• • Wait About 30 Minutes: Your mental urge to use drugs usually last for less than 15 minutes to all of 30 minutes. Whenever that impulse comes, it might feel like time has slowed to a crawl. However, by distracting yourself with worthwhile activities, time will pass faster.

• • One Day at a Time: Your relapse recovery has to happen one day at a time. Don’t be ashamed that you have moments of weakness. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed with the prospect of remaining abstinent forever, since that can paralyze you from doing any action. 

• Physical Relapse: This is the final stage of relapse, which many addicts mistake as being the actual relapse event. Relapse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. After recovery, you need to undergo the previous two stages of relapse in order to go from Point A to Point B to Point C. Bad habits, after all, die hard.

• • Natural Progression: Once you start thinking about relapse, you need to stop because if you don’t use the techniques above to distract yourself, the natural progression or conclusion to all that is complete relapse and giving into your growing impulses to imbibe and abuse various substances.

• • Full Relapse: Once you give in, you might end up smoking a marijuana joint, injecting meth or snorting coke or popping opioid pills. It’s difficult to stop the relapse at that point, thus necessitating going back to inpatient rehab or availing of an aftercare service that’s either outpatient in nature or involves sober residences.

• • Brute-Force Abstinence: You’ll now need to achieve abstinence through brute force or end up back at square one. If you thought that you’ve ended up at the bottom of the barrel, watch out. You might even dig a hole through the barrel, such that you can end up worse off than before you got rehab. 

• • Prevention Is Still Better Than the Cure:You might as well check yourself into medical detoxification and restart your rehab program once you undergo the physical relapse stage. Therefore, it’s much better to recognize the early warning signs that you’re undergoing the relapse process. This will allow you to only need aftercare and therapy instead of a full-blown trip back to a rehab center. 

When undergoing recovery from full physical relapse, this might include a few weeks or months of returning to your old treatment program to get you back on track to sobriety. The intensity of the return treatment at the rehab center depends on how long you’ve been using drugs again after your relapse: The shorter the turnaround the shorter the extra month at the wellness facility.

• • Dual Diagnosis: Once you’re back at rehab, certain adjustments may be made from your original treatment to take into account your relapse. If you have an underlying previously undiagnosed dual-diagnosis or co-occurring condition that caused you to relapse, then a more individualized therapy might be called for or specific medications designed to treat your malady other than addiction might be adjusted. 

• • Aftercare Considerations:After you’ve gone through the program, you usually have to depend on aftercare in order to prevent relapse from happening in the first place. The thoroughness of the aftercare program of a given rehabilitation center can significantly reduce your chances of relapsing. It can even nip the issue right in the bud by making you aware of when emotional or mental relapse is occurring and what you can do to combat them.

• • Be Aware of the Triggers of Relapse:Memorize the top ten triggers of relapse and use your knowledge in order to better deal with them, like taking the right measures and medication to overcome your withdrawal symptoms all the way to throwing away the things that you use to get your illicit drug dosages. You should also not overestimate your ability to quit drugs cold turkey, since we’re all only human.

• • Change Your Friends:Your so-called friends and home environment might serve as your enabler and source of drugs. Once you’ve made the decision to not be an addict anymore, you will have to change everything about your life routines, including the type of people you hang out with. You’ll really have to choose new friends if the friends you currently have keep peer-pressuring you towards becoming an addict again.

• • Establish More Positive Social Circles:Instead of going to the club or hanging out with your drug-using gang, you should join drug-free places like a local book club at the library or a prayer meeting if you’re the religious type. You can also take up yoga, attend martial arts classes, get into the hobby of videogames, or start up gardening. You should do anything that doesn’t have anything to do with drugs or abusing them.

• • Don’t Visit Old Haunts:Don’t go to the places where you can usually avail of drugs. Don’t go to the homes of friends who use drugs either. Obviously, you shouldn’t go to any site where you’ve previously gotten stashes upon stashes of recreational substances. You should also ban yourself from going to any dance clubs, bars, and raves as well as certain parts of college campuses where parties occur regardless of whether or not you’ve been there before.

Dealing with Relapse in a Nutshell

One of the dangers of drug addiction treatment and recovery is drug addiction relapse. Withdrawal symptoms and your own wavering willpower can lead you to a moment of weakness that’ll have you end up taking those pills or snorting that powder as well as huffing that bong or burning that spoon. Your body doesn’t only physically crave for the drugs you’re addicted to. Your mind may also betray you due to the altered brain chemistry you’ve gotten from taking a lot of drugs.

You should have a steel-trap mind to help you develop the willpower to overcome drug usage. Remember that once you pop you can’t stop. Play that tape of the full scenario that usually happens when you use drugs. The logical conclusion is that you’ll relapse and you’ll undo everything that your rehabilitation built up. After you let your mind realize the ugly truth of drugs, then using drugs to escape whatever uncomfortable state your emotions are in won’t be as appealing, especially if it will only lead you to feeling worse after temporary relief. 

Drug Addiction Rehab in Lanna Rehab That Prevents Relapse 

Contact the Lanna Rehabilitation Center today through their 24/7 hotline in order to avail of their drug addiction rehab and holistic approach to dealing with all sorts of addictions altogether. They offer free consultation for your rehab needs and they’re available through various medical or rehab tourism packages so that you can get the most out of your inpatient rehab investment. Most importantly, the provide aftercare services and follow-ups in order to reduce the occurrence of drug addiction relapse. Call now.