What are the Side Effects of Heroin Use?
Heroin is a highly illegal and extremely addictive drug that’s made from morphine, which is naturally found in certain varieties of poppy flowers. In the purest forms, it’s commonly snorted or smoked, and in the tar-like, crude form, it’s normally dissolved and injected. It affects the opioid receptors in the brain, and once it enters the brain from the bloodstream, [...]
Negative Thinking Impacts More than you Think
When we get caught up in some of the harder times in our lives, there’s a tendency to let negative thinking overpower your mind. Difficult or painful situations tend to create the mental mixture needed to turn even a positive person into a source of negativity. When we wallow in self pity or have a bad point of view on [...]
What are the Long Term Effects of Meth on the Body?
Methamphetamine is one of the most toxic drugs in existence. Made from any number of chemicals that are harmful or deadly on their own, the drug produces an often intense initial rush of euphoria and a bump in energy. This sensation is often the most potent with the first use, and users spend their addiction trying to recreate that feeling, [...]
Making Better Choices After Addiction
Making a decision after we battle addiction, can feel surprisingly overwhelming. What if you make the wrong choice? What if your decision triggers a relapse? Even if you feel confident to make a decision, it can be hard to know what the best choice for your recovery is. It’s important to learn to use the tools learned in recovery for [...]
Is Life Going to be Boring in Sobriety?
Drug and alcohol addiction often go hand in hand with a partying, exciting lifestyle that’s riddled with danger. When people struggling with these addictions think about getting clean and sober, they shudder at the idea of living a boring life, as if their substance use is their only pleasure in life and the key to their salvation from boredom. Even [...]
Learning to Receive Feedback is Important – Here’s Why
Feedback is helpful information or constructive criticism about a person’s previous action or behavior in the hope of helping to improve performance for the next time. This sounds beneficial, right? Anyone can benefit from feedback, and it provides the opportunity and information to help improve what someone’s doing. The fact is, when people hear that they’re going to get feedback [...]
How do I Manage my Triggers?
Treatment is just one facet of battling addiction. It’s a huge accomplishment, to successfully complete a treatment program for addiction to drugs or alcohol, but the challenge really begins when you walk out of the treatment facility back into reality. Triggers can surprise us and set off cravings, even if we’ve been sober for years, and they can come in [...]
It’s Okay to be Happy in Sobriety
The things we do and say during addiction can haunt us. We may have caused serious, even irreparable damage to our relationships with friends and family, we may have lost a job, even struggled with financial or legal difficulties. Addiction has the tendency to destroy every aspect of a person’s life. When you’ve made it through treatment, and you’re waking [...]
Is Marijuana Addictive?
With the movement to legalize both medical and recreational marijuana across the country, we’re learning more and more each day about the benefits of cannabis for medical conditions like epilepsy, cancer, PTSD, even eating disorders and depression. There’s a consistent flow of stories about how marijuana has helped people quit taking dangerous prescriptions, and it’s combated the opioid addiction in [...]
How to Overcome Fear in Sobriety
When we first really come into sobriety and we’re in a somewhat delicate state, we’re often overcome with anxiety and fear. Even the smallest stressor or setback make us feel like we’re absolutely bound to relapse or need further treatment. We tiptoe around our lives, sometimes scared to even breathe for fear of triggering cravings. The things we loved to [...]