Anxiety and alcohol or drug addiction are connected. It’s also common to feel anxiety in sobriety as many people use alcohol or drugs to alleviate social anxiety. Once you’ve reached sobriety, you might still have times of anxiety that you don’t know how to cure. Alcohol and drugs rewire your brain in a way that might increase anxiety if you already suffer from it.
Learn new ways to cope with internal and external addiction relapse triggers so that you can overcome them and avoid relapse.
Getting sober has been the biggest awakening in my entire life; not because I have refrained from jell-o wrestling, frequent blackouts, and crying while watching How I Met Your Mother because I wanted friends…
Rather, I finally became a part of something bigger than myself! Having a sense of community and essentially ‘belonging’ to a community was what I longed for my entire life.
In the midst of our disease, our world is chaos.
Everything we do feels rushed, overwhelming, and debilitating. Everyone we talk to is frustrating, nosy, and again, overwhelming. Every thought that enters our head feels cluttered, irrevocably powerful, and disheveled.
Our world is chaos and we don’t even realize the extent of our pain; what we do feel, however, is the weight of our thoughts: “life is so hard,” “why can’t I just get through one day without feeling like the world is ending,” “how can I keep on living this way forever?”
Then we get help. Whether self-diagnosed or court mandated, we find ourselves in a rehabilitation center for drugs and alcohol, or maybe even dual diagnosis.
