Call 888-647-0579 to speak with an alcohol or drug abuse counselor.

Who Answers?

Tips for Staying Sober After Alcohol Treatment

Once you complete treatment at an alcohol treatment center you will be faced with the next challenge—staying sober after alcohol treatment. While you may think it will be easy to stay sober after alcohol treatment, for many, staying sober is a difficult and long road. It’s not that you are still physically addicted, just that when you are faced with the challenge of maintaining sobriety outside of the alcohol treatment center environment it can be difficult to stay on track. Here’s a look at some tips that will make staying sober after alcohol treatment a little bit easier to maintain.

Honest After Alcohol Treatment

If you aren’t honest with yourself then you can’t be honest with anyone—after all, who can you trust if you don’t trust yourself? The most important thing you can do after alcohol treatment is to remain honest with yourself. If you are thinking about using, don’t just mask those feelings, call someone and talk about the struggles you are having. Staying honest and true to yourself and to others about your addiction will help you to remember where you once were and how far you have come since then.

Avoid Triggers When Possible

Success after alcohol treatment is possible!

You won’t always be able to avoid potential triggers that could cause you to drink but in many cases you can. For instance, don’t go to the bar with your friends and expect to just hang out and have a drink. Just one drink leads to another and another. If you were once addicted to alcohol so badly that you had to go into alcohol treatment to recover then it’s not a good idea to drink at all after you finish alcohol treatment—even if it is just one.

Rest and Relax

You can’t let your guard down too much in some situations but when you are at home and in a situation where there’s really nothing triggering you to potentially drink, rest and relax. In alcohol treatment you are given ample opportunity to rest, relax and to reflect on your current situation and the things you have learned. Employing these same routines outside of alcohol treatment will help you to stay sober.

Keep End Goals in Mind

When you started alcohol treatment the common goal was probably just to stop drinking. Then you set small goals that will help you to work toward a larger overall goal such as stay sober for 90 days and rebuild my relationship with my child or spouse. Even after alcohol treatment it’s important that you continue to work toward your goals and continue to set goals as you go. You should have already developed a list of goals that you would like to accomplish when you were working with your counselor in alcohol treatment, now that you are out of treatment keep working toward those same goals and also toward new ones. If you fall off track, do the best you can to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward with your recovery.

More Treatment & Detox Articles

Fears rise as binge drinking among youths increases

Significant increases in youth binge drinking and hospitalizations has government officials worried. Experts are considering new methods to prevent German children from harming themselves through consuming alcohol. Alcohol has been a socially accepted and legalized drug in most parts of the world since humans first learned the secrets of fermentation. But there’s a rapidly growing….

Stressed Diggers turning to alcohol on return from front line

ALCOHOL has become the treatment of choice for an unfortunate number of Australian troops left traumatised by their service in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Taxpayers are now funding rehabilitation and sometimes compensation for their addiction, not to mention attempts to break it, as troops return from mostly dry operations to deal with their problems….

Getting your fix at the doctor’s office

A group of Canadian researchers has demonstrated the truth of a practice commonly used in European countries like The Netherlands and Switzerland: Heroin can be an effective treatment for chronic, relapsing heroin addicts. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study is “the first rigorous test of the approach performed in North America,”….

Effects of binge drinking linger

Heavy drinking adversely affects a person’s performance and perception hours after alcohol has left the body, researchers in Rhode Island said. Researchers at Brown University recruited 95 healthy adults ages 21 to 35 who had reported having a hangover at least one time within the month before the research began. The participants were randomly assigned….

Fetal alcohol exposure affects teenage drinking behavior

According to scientists, there is a link between exposure to alcohol in the womb and an attraction to its smell during teenage life. The researchers state that a fetus can recall and be drawn to odor stimuli from what its mother ingests during pregnancy. A new study from the State University of New York found….