How to recover from addiction — 6 steps to avoid cravings

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If you have a problem with addiction… Welcome to the club.

The use of marijuana (alcohol, or any other drugs) often takes place as a defense mechanism against difficult emotions. Addiction is also used as an escape from trauma and PTSD. The consumption can be adaptive during a certain time since it avoids feeling the pain. However, at some point, I think most of us would like to get out of this addiction. To do so, it is important to heal post-traumatic symptoms and release repressed emotions through therapy and other healing methods. By choosing the path of sobriety, we also choose to regain power over our lives in order to create the life we dream of.

Here are some daily habits you can perform in your path to recovery

1. Choose firmly to close the door to marijuana (or any other product). As suggested by Benjamin Hardy, PhD, leaving the door open to a choice statistically increases the likelihood of performing the undesired behavior. On days where the willpower, or motivation, isn’t present, you can refer to that clear prohibition you’ve put in your mind to make sure the door to the possibility of smoking is closed (Willpower doesn’t work, 2018, Benjamin Hardy). By doing so, you will experience less decision fatigue: the mental energy you spend on thinking if you should consume or not.
2. Change your physical environment, removing every trigger that could make you crave marijuana. As James Clear suggested in Atomic Habits: “The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior” (p.48).
   Removed all the stimuli from your apartment or house: ashtray, lighters, rolling papers, pieces of cards used to make filters, and any object related to your addiction. You can even move your furniture around to trick your brain into thinking that you are in a slightly different space. Finally, I encourage you not to spend time with your drinking friends or go to places where the substance is present. This involves setting boundaries in certain relationships.
3. Grab a piece of paper and list some activities that you can do whenever you feel anxious, bored, or have a craving. You can also schedule some activities during the hours you would normally smoke.
   *What activity would allow you to take care of yourself?
   *Is there any particular activity that helps you canalize a particular emotion?
   Ideas: going for a walk, exercise taking a bath, breathing exercises, read a book, talk to a friend, have a therapy session, make art, meditate. Whatever makes you feel good.
   By fulfilling your intellectual, creative, physical, spiritual, and emotional, your brain will generate dopamine in the brain, and by other means than taking drugs!
   You can even take this list and taped it into one of your walls, prominently displayed, to make sure you can access it instantaneously if needed.
4. Join meetings of people who will engage with you towards achieving your goal. Meetings help to get out of the loneliness. After experiencing trauma, you tend to isolate yourself. But addiction brings even more isolation into our lives. Being able to meet other people who are going through the same thing can help us realize that we are not alone in carrying this baggage. It creates a safe space where we can feel understood and fully welcomed, as well as supporting each other.
5. Whenever a craving appears, do that breathing exercise (sober is the acronym):
   STOP — Stop what you are doing
   OBSERVE— Observe the craving and take a distance from it. It’s just a thought. If you don’t stick to it, it can disappear in 20 seconds.
   BREATH — cardiac coherence — Inhale for 5 seconds. Exhale for 5 seconds. Repeat for a total of 5 minutes. The app RespiRelax+is really useful for this! Instead of waiting for a craving to appear, you can also make it a habit by performing it 3 times a day: in the mornings, evenings, and at night.
   EXPEND — Expend your attention and consciousness to your body, the space around you and the sounds.
   RESEARCH OF A SOLUTION — Look for an alternative to smoking. Here, the list of activities can be helpful.
6. Finally, if you feel like it’s not enough and you need to talk to someone, you can dial save a number in your phone of a 24/7 phone helpline, and dial it. These phone lines are dedicated to addicts and are completely free. At any time, you could choose to pick up the phone and call a counselor who would listen to you about your craving, help you identify the need behind the craving, and give you different tools to meet that need other than consumption. If you are interested in finding a number, just google “24/7 addiction hotline” and several numbers will be available to you.

Interview with Benjamin Hardy, PhD, Joe Polish and Tommy Rosen

Those tools helped me, and I hope they can help you too!

Take care and I wish you all the best in your path to recovery!