If you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction or is already in recovery, it is important that coping skills be continually integrated and used to achieve lasting success. The right coping skills in recovery can keep your mind and body healthy and offer a sustainable way to tackle challenges and cravings when they arise.
What Are Coping Skills?
Coping skills refer to skills you can develop over the course of your lifetime, which enable you to make healthier, safer choices when you are faced with challenges like:
- Stress
- Cravings
- Triggers
- Trauma
Coping skills represent a vast array of potential skills that can be used at home, at work, during rehab, or throughout recovery. The right coping skills are typically made up of several coping mechanisms that work for individual situations.
Developing Coping Skills in Recovery
When you receive treatment for addiction and/or co-occurring mental health disorders, coping skills will be taught during recovery and are things you can continue to use throughout each level of care.
Inpatient Coping Skills in Recovery
If you are participating in an inpatient or residential treatment program, you will find that your daily schedule consists of individual and group therapy alongside holistic care. During those sessions, coping mechanisms will be introduced.
These are coping mechanisms that you can practice while you are struggling with your initial stages of recovery, such as dealing with cravings immediately after your detox or overcoming feelings of anxiety about sharing information during group therapy sessions.
These types of coping skills in recovery extend to learned habits and behaviors like setting a regular schedule and sticking to it, incorporating exercise on a daily basis, and focusing on healthy nutrition. Such coping skills set the foundation for a long-term, sustainable recovery, keeping your mind and body as healthy as possible while you repair the damage done by drug and alcohol abuse.
Outpatient Coping Skills in Recovery
As you transition into an outpatient program, you will have the opportunity to build on the foundational coping skills with more personalized skills that can be applied to acute situations like an unexpectedly difficult day, problems communicating, or long-term cravings.
These might include things like:
- Meditation
- Breathwork
- Physical activity
- Yoga
- Mindfulness
- Art
- Music
- Animal therapy
- Nature therapy
All of these coping skills can be used in recovery at any stage. If you are participating in an outpatient program, you have the unique opportunity to practice your coping skills in recovery and then report back to your next individual or group therapy session to discuss how effective you found certain mechanisms to be. This also provides an opportunity to monitor the long-term success of different coping skills and to add more personalized combinations where necessary.
Recovery
As you transition into long-term recovery and have completed your inpatient and outpatient programs, you will find that the same types of coping skills in recovery provide useful structure for physical and mental well-being.
Having a regular schedule like that provided during inpatient treatment gives you more willpower throughout the day to make healthy decisions when you are faced with stress. Utilizing movement and physical activity by taking a walk whenever you feel anxious or participating in a local yoga class when you are feeling lonely can help you tackle difficult emotions without resorting to drugs and alcohol to numb those emotions.
Developing Coping Skills with Sequoia Recovery Centers
At Sequoia Recovery Centers, our team offers a full continuum of care starting with detox and continuing to residential, PHP, IOP, and traditional outpatient care. At each phase at our drug and alcohol detox center, you will work toward developing sustainable coping skills for recovery, things that you can always turn to when there are unexpected challenges.
We work hard to provide treatment for alcohol addiction, cocaine, opioids, prescription drugs, and more. When you reach out to our center, we will provide an initial assessment to determine what level of care is most appropriate and then help you transition through each program in a step-down process throughout the course of treatment. Our goal is to empower each client with the coping skills they need for long-term success.
Overall, there are several ways you can develop coping skills through inpatient, outpatient, and aftercare programs. Setting a regular schedule, eating healthy meals, getting adequate sleep, taking care of your body with physical activity, or your mind with meditation can all contribute to a better recovery. The best coping skills for recovery represent individualized skills that you find useful, and at Sequoia Recovery Centers, we can help you today.
Contact our team to start your assessment.