New Year's Eve is the ultimate excuse to party hard. Call it amateur hour, but New Year’s makes drug users everywhere, reformed and not, pause and remember crazy years past. So what can you do on New Year’s, if you aren’t planning to get high?
Don't people choose to drink or do drugs? How can addiction be a disease?Addiction is much more than a few bad choices. It disrupts the areas of the brain that are involved in reward, motivation, learning, judgement, and memory. Not only can it damage brain and body functions, but it can also damage relationships, families, and workplaces.
Tracey Helton Mitchell, author of The Big Fix, explains why relapse shouldn't be treated as a dead end: "There were many relapses that I turned into learning experiences. Recovery is a marathon not a sprint. While not welcomed, relapses shouldn’t be treated as a dead end."
Quitting drugs is like any breakup. You’ve got to have your friends sit you down and tell you why that asshole wasn’t good for you, even when you can’t stop thinking about that one time you kissed in the rain and it felt like everything. You’ve got to have constant reminders, in those early times, of why something that became all you could think about moment to moment wasn’t good for you. I’m here to give you those reminders, or at least the ones that worked for me when I quit.
When I started writing this article the concept was to write about the point at which seven of us reached the end of our substance use disorder, and sought help. It was to show others that while that point may have looked different to all of us, we all had mounting consequences and a dire need to seek more for our lives—a life worth living, if you will.
High-achievers are able to still perform at work and thus, their substance abuse can go unnoticed for quite a bit of time. This was my story, until it wasn’t.
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