Learning Our Relapse Triggers

An important part of working to prevent relapse is learning what our triggers are. It can help us to look back at the times when we were actively using, to figure out what things increased our urges to use and decreased our willpower to avoid using. For many of us, stress is the biggest trigger for our addictions. When we feel anxious, worried or panicked, we might feel that the only way we can calm ourselves down is with our addictive habits. We might be stressed about everyday challenges and haven’t developed healthy coping mechanisms to deal with them. We might be experiencing difficult conflict in our relationships, and the mounting anger and anxiety we feel might make us want to use. We might be experiencing doubt about our abilities to continue in recovery, and the stress of the demands might feel like more than we can bear. Just like stress and anxiety, depression can also be a trigger for us. For many of us, it was our deep sadness that drove us to our addictions in the first place. We have learned to self-medicate our emotional pain with our addictive substances and behaviors. We might not yet have learned healthy ways of dealing with our sadness, such as therapy and energy healing. Boredom can leave us not knowing how to spend all the extra time we have on our hands now that we’re not using. If we don’t figure out how to fill that time with positive and productive things, we can easily be tempted to revert back to old habits. Loss is a huge trigger for us and is one of the emotional difficulties we can have a very hard time facing. If we’ve recently gone through a breakup or experienced any kind of loss, we may feel driven to numb the pain of our grief with our addictions. Our pain can cause us to act out in desperate ways, including returning to the addictions we’ve worked so hard to recover from. Sometimes when we think we’ve reached a safe place in our recovery where we think we’re no longer in danger of relapsing, we have a tendency to start neglecting our self-care and our wellbeing because we think we’re fine. We might start making unhealthy choices for our health, such as not getting enough sleep or working too hard without rest. Exhaustion is a known trigger for relapse, because it can weaken our resolve and self-determination, not to mention increase our stress levels, anxiety and depression. When we’re not taking good care of ourselves, we’re that much more likely to lose the willpower we’ve been working to develop. Learning more about ourselves and our triggers is an important part of recovery. Call 1-888-986-7848 for information on our treatment programs.