Reasons to Stay Sober

The sober life is never easy, especially if you’ve had personal experience with drugs or some types of alcohol before. Trying to get and maintain sobriety is often one of the hardest life changing events ever attempted, however the payoff at the end will be more worth it than one can ever imagine.

Nobody’s sobriety journey is the same, everyone attempts sobriety and begins the process in the same way. Knowing yourself and finding out what makes you tick is key in overcoming your struggles and getting sober. At times, it’s easy to become discouraged. Sobriety isn’t easy, as it’s a lifelong process. That said, it’s not impossible, and you can get clean. Your life as an addict can come to an end and you can overcome this. Figuring out what is important to you and using that as an incentive is key to most people’s sobriety journey.

How should you approach this, then? What are the key questions that you should ask yourself to help get and stay sober? We don’t have all the answers, but we might have the key to helping ask the right ones. With the overwhelming amount of things that seem like the right way to approach these things, the key is finding what makes you excited to get and stay sober.

Managing Goals and Expectations

Learning how to set and manage your goals is a skill that persists not just in your sobriety journey. Learning this skill will be something that will help you all throughout your life. Since self discovery is such a big part of this process, learning yourself and how to set these things is unsurprisingly, a huge help.

What’s the kind of person that you want to be? What do you want to do with your life? With that goal in mind, what are some concrete things that you can do in order to take those first steps and find specific expectations? Creating goals and setting yourself up for success is one way to accomplish this.

Goals cannot exist solely in your mind or on paper. They need to be actionable. You need to be able to go to them in your times of weakness and remember what you’re fighting for. Find what inspires you and what makes you want to fight, and fight for that thing. Below are just a few things that you can use to get the creative process started. Maybe none of these things directly speak to you, that’s okay. Find something that might make you want something more just a little bit, then develop it.

The more actionable an idea is, the easier it is to actually get yourself to do.

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7 Physical Reasons

Sober living doesn’t just mean easier mornings and getting up easier. What it means is an improved physical life all around. One aspect of the goal setting process is finding something that means a great deal to you personally, then setting that thing as the goal. Read on for some inspiration on what might be a good encouragement for you to create a goal.

1. Better overall healthDrugs and alcohol don’t only affect you for the moment. It affects all parts of your body in major ways and some of the most important parts of your body. Nobody is completely immune from some rather dangerous diseases as we age, and the truth is long term alcohol use can seriously increase your chances of dying from critical organ failure. For many people that decide to get sober, their decision isn’t only coming from them, but the fact that they have a responsibility to a family as well.
2. Better mental focusBrain fog is a symptom of long-term alcohol use. Many know the feeling – the one where you can’t focus, you feel as though your life is being lived by someone else and you’re just out of reach of consciousness. Overcoming this brain fog can be something of a daily routine – will you ever snap out of it, or will you live your life as a passenger in your own body? The good news is, though this is one of the first symptoms to show up, it’s also one of the first to leave. You will wake up with better mental clarity with every successive day that you choose to stay sober.
3. Better daily sleepSleep is a huge part of health. Alcohol can wreak havoc on your sleep schedule, causing you to fall asleep at strange times and not in with your body’s regular rhythm. If you are dependent on alcohol, the first nights will be worse, not better. However, with time, those symptoms too will fade and you will be able to return to a regular sleeping pattern.
4. More EnergyAlcohol slows your body down. It reduces your energy levels and prevents you from reaching your full 100% energy level. It’s not easy living every day hoping that your energy will somehow return, the truth is, without a change, it won’t. Your body runs on what you put in it. If you continue to put unhealthy things inside of your body, you will feel the effects of that. The downward spiral starts with not feeling good enough to continue the day, thus spurring on alcohol drinking, thus making your next day worse. This cycle needs to be recognized then stopped.
5. Better SkinYour skin is a living part of your body. It renews itself, and it draws what it can make itself from with the stuff that you put inside your body. If you don’t feed yourself well, you will start seeing the effects in nearly every part of your life, including your skin. After only a few days of getting sober, you will start to see the effects reverse.
6. Lower risk of life-threatening diseases, including cancer.Long term alcohol abuse can increase the risk of many different diseases. These diseases include heart disease, kidney failure, and cancer. While some of the damage that you do to your body might be permanent, you can still decrease the risk of these diseases substantially by quitting drinking altogether.
7. Improved weight control and healthier lifestyleAlcohol promotes an unhealthy lifestyle. Quitting alcohol will put you in more positions to make healthier choices. If you are someone who finds weight management hard, drinking alcohol only makes it harder, and therefore, stopping drinking will help you manage your weight.

Additional Positives

Aside from other physical benefits, there are many emotional, spiritual, and relational benefits to staying sober. Relationships are easier to keep, friendships are easier to make, the pressure of your life will decrease, making you a person that is easier to hang out with and be around in general.

So what makes a sober life worth living? As laid out above, it’s not often just one thing. It’s often a combination of a handful of things that you can look at and say “yes, that’s part of what it means to be human and that’s why I want to live a sober life.” These things aren’t easy to identify without any specific thought put into them. Taking the time to think about them and then making them important to you can be key in your sobriety journey. Looking back on the good old days is fun, but it’s good to know that you’re in the good old days while you’re in them, and this is part of the process that you’ll learn to do.

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Living Life Sober

So then, what does your sober life look like? Your life will be more fulfilled, happier, and you will lead an overall healthier life. Leaving your old habits for a fulfilling life that you will find with sobriety will put you in front of so many challenges, but the rewards are great after it’s all said and done.

If you know someone who is struggling with addiction or you yourself are, please reach out to our staff at Ecosoberhouse.com. If you don’t know where to start, we do. We have staff ready and willing to help you and meet you where you’re at.