Addiction-Abuse

How to Overcome Addiction

Addiction to drugs is a serious health risk that has the potential to ruin your life as well as the lives of your loved ones.  Once you realise you are addicted you may want to find ways and means of overcoming the addiction. Booking into drug rehab is by far the best and easiest way to achieve your goal simply because there are many experienced and qualified staff to help you day and night.

First you need to set some goals so that you will know exactly what you want to achieve. While overcoming drugs will need help, if you are addicted to something like alcohol you may not want to stop drinking altogether, but only enough to save your relationships or to achieve some other goal such as safe driving. It’s important to know what your goal is before you start as that will help you know how to proceed.

One problem is that while some people who smoke or drink are addicted to those things, other people can smoke or drink the same amount without being addicted. They can stop just like that with no withdrawal symptoms at all and no going back to it. You will know if you are addicted if you keep doing it even though you’ve decided not to.

Some heavy drinkers decide to get to the point of just having one drink a day. While this may not be ideal from a health point of view, it will certainly be much better than having many drinks a day. It will be better for your health, your relationships and your wallet. Once you have the goal in mind, it is time to work out how to go about it.

Some people feel that it is best to jump straight to the goal, that is, reducing the number of drinks or smokes to the one per day, if that was the goal. Others feel better if they do it more gradually. Cutting out just one drink a day until you feel comfortable with that, then cutting out another one and so on until the goal is reached. Then again, even cutting out one per day is too much for some addicts.

What you need to do is when it comes time to have that drink, is put it off for 10 minutes, then half an hour. During that time keep yourself busy with other things and don’t have access to the drink. Keep telling yourself that you can do without it for another 5 minutes until an hour is up or until you get to the time you usually have your second drink. Your body will gradually learn to do without it.

Another way to reduce gradually is by pouring less into the glass and drinking it more slowly. By doing this constantly you are training your body to get by with less. While this is slower, it is much less stressful.