Habits are going to be critical for Introverted Recovery. You might consider bookmarking this article and reviewing it periodically, as it is integral to the Introverted Recovery program.
1) I started out with the premise of “I’m not going to go to AA meetings every day.” Most people in recovery just do that by default–they go to a meeting every day. I had to replace that habit and find something else that worked. I wanted to avoid social solutions.
2) In introverted Recovery, we design a program of recovery around physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. We make lists, we complete tasks, and thus we create habits. It is too easy to say “I’m not doing AA, but I’ll do all this other stuff” and then let it all slide. You will relapse in that case. You need a rigorous, strict system to maintain your new list of habits.
3) We need to determine what habits to adopt, then we need to implement a daily system. Remember, you have to actually do the stuff or you will relapse.
4) What habits you adopt are outlined and suggested throughout the IR program. There is flexibility involved. Everyone’s path will look different. That said, I can give you a general guideline here–a default set of habits–that should get you up and running.
What does a day of Introverted Recovery look like?
Each habit that you form is going to be building up your holistic health in some way, meaning it will benefit you either:
* Physically
* Emotionally
* Spiritually
* Mentally
So in order to build the habits, we simply find the daily habits that support those goals, and then we turn them into daily tasks.
Then we have our list of daily assignments. Our checklist.
Let’s look at an example of what someone’s daily task list might look like in Introverted Recovery:
1) Write in our journal (emotional health, mental health).
2) Go for a walk outside (physical health, spiritual health).
3) Attend a 1 on 1 therapy session (emotional health, mental health).
4) Read recovery/personal growth literature (emotional health, mental health).
5) Text our friend in recovery at the end of the day and check in with them to see how their day went (emotional health, spiritual health).
So perhaps you have this daily checklist and the only thing that is not daily is the 1 on 1 therapy. But the rest of it happens every single day and after a while it all becomes automatic.
This has 3 major benefits:
1) Immediate daily benefits – the person gets the benefit of the task every day, such as the boost in mood from taking the walk, or the emotional connection when messaging their friend.
2) Cumulative benefits – in this example, the personal growth gains from therapy, from reading literature, and from insights gained from journaling — all of those efforts start to accumulate as you continue with those personal growth habits over time.
3) Preventative benefits – relapse prevention. Taking a calming walk every day can save you from a potential relapse. So can reaching out to a friend every night, even via text. So can weekly therapy sessions. You build your relapse prevention plan into the daily habits that you establish.
All three of these elements are helpful to our recovery. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Cumulative benefits – discovering new habits through goal setting
James Clear wrote “small habits don’t add up, they compound” meaning that you can get oversized, impressive results by just taking small, consistent action every day.
The concept is that if you get just 1 percent better each day, imagine where you will be a year from now.
One way to discover this kind of personal growth is through first setting a goal, say, writing a novel or running a marathon.
You are either writing pages every day or getting out there and jogging on a daily basis, otherwise you’re not progressing towards your goal.
In either case, the progression towards the goal establishes the daily habit. The marathon runner will likely continue exercising long after the race. The novelist probably isn’t done with their writing career just because they finished their first book. They’ve established habits now, and they keep going.
And, the benefits start to accumulate. The runner gets into even better shape, improving their speed and their time. The writer continues to improve and polish their craft. They each get better and better.
This same effect–of continuous improvement and compounding benefit–can happen in all sorts of areas of your life in which you may be striving for improvement:
* Mindfulness – a daily practice of mindfulness techniques that one day allows for you to have a high level of self awareness and vastly reduced stress.
* Fitness – a daily habit of exercise allows you to be healthy, energetic, and more resilient to handle the adversity of life’s challenges.
* Career – a daily habit of learning can translate into training, a degree, or a certificate that could open a door to a new job or a career change.
* Relationships – a daily habit of reaching out to someone could lead to a deep and meaningful connection over time.
These are just a few examples. There are all sorts of areas of your life where small habits can snowball into massive personal growth.
Preventative benefits – figuring out what is vitally important to your sobriety
Once you have become established in your recovery, one of the keys is in long term relapse prevention.
Part of that is becoming the person who no longer wants or needs to self medicate.
The other part of that is in having the tools to deal with the inevitable triggers that will pop up from time to time.
You will be tempted. Every addict and alcoholic has to face their drug of choice eventually. Or to put it more specifically, everyone will go through enough emotional turmoil at some point that they will desperately want to self medicate.
You need a relapse prevention plan that is able to deal with “the emotional turmoil that makes you want to self medicate.”
That relapse prevention plan has to be automatic.
It cannot be something that you have to think about, and then say, okay, I’m getting really upset, now I should do X, Y or Z in order to avoid relapse. That amount of required thinking will not save you.
Relapse prevention has to be built into who you become in recovery.
And that means your daily habits.
Your day to day actions have to help you in preventing relapse.
So now that we know why these habits are so vitally important, let’s just cut to the chase and get to some examples.
You won’t need all of these, of course, because everyone’s recovery is different. But there are certainly some necessary themes here:
1) Exercise – one of the most distraught moments in my recovery journey was when I went through an intense breakup. I forged ahead that day with my usual exercise routine, and I was so beside myself with emotional turmoil, that I just kept exercising. And exercising. And I just kept going. At the end of it all I collapsed and I slept and I woke up the next day and felt like I could start “picking up the pieces emotionally” and start moving on. I credit the habit of exercise as getting me through that intense moment. A bit unusual, I admit–but it worked for me.
2) Meditation – this is a big one for sure. If you want a way to calm the storm, you are going to need a way to tame the mind. As I mentioned above, I needed a long bout of cardio in order to “simulate meditation.” That was sort of my way of “cheating my way into fake meditation,” but I believe it is effective. If you walk/jog along the countryside for an hour, I believe you get similar benefits as sitting with your eyes closed in the lotus position. At any rate, I believe meditation is key to your daily repertoire. If you can master the art of seated meditation, in silence, eyes closed, then by all means, do so. Everyone who is successful in the long run has to find a way to calm their mind, however they accomplish it.
3) Self reflection – one thing that people get when they attend an AA meeting every single day is personal insight. They “talk it out” in the meeting, and sometimes people give them feedback. As introverts, we aren’t necessarily getting that “shortcut to self awareness.” So we need to get it in other ways. While there may be multiple methods of self reflection, the one-and-done solution is to simply write in a daily journal. It doesn’t have to be complicated at all–just a 10 minute “brain dump” of whatever is going on in your life that day. Get it out of your brain and on to the page. You get the benefits from actually doing it, not from thinking about how it might help…
4) Therapy – one of the common themes in addiction and alcoholism that you have probably heard or discovered by now is that we can easily fool ourselves. We can trick ourselves into thinking that we are doing the right things, or that we are taking the right steps, or that we are strong enough in our recovery, and so on. We can convince ourselves that we are strong when in fact we may be in a vulnerable position. This is why we need self reflection, so that we can gain some perspective on ourselves.
But another really strong tool for this is having a therapist. They can help warn us when we “have blinders on” and may be headed into danger. And they can help keep us on a path of personal growth when we slide into complacency. They can help us to identify pain points and give us a plan to work through them. Navigating early recovery without a therapist is playing the game on hard mode.
5) Connection – Yes, I know you are an introvert. But I’m not talking about daily AA meetings here. I’m simply suggesting that making a habit of doing a simply check-in with someone on a consistent basis can have tremendous value. Or rather, without this “leg of the table” in place, your overall recovery will become vastly weaker, because complete isolation is more than most people can handle. So, you need to figure out what this 1 on 1 connection looks like for you. It could be something like:
* Having coffee with a family member once a week on a set day and time.
* Texting or messaging a friend that is also in recovery on a daily basis just to say hi and see what they are up to.
* Incorporating a workout partner to your exercise routine, such as walking with a friend on a regular schedule, or meeting someone at the gym.
Again, you don’t have to become a social butterfly. But having a consistent bit of human connection will still provide huge value for your recovery.
How to actually form a habit
So now you have habits you want to form. How do you do it?
1) Start with your “daily checklist.” This is going to become the basis for most of your new habits anyway. Dive deep into the daily work of using your checklist and as you become used to the process you can start considering what should become more permanent for you.
2) Only take on one new habit at a time. Lock it in before you move on to the next one. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much or you will fail and give up on all of it. One thing at a time.
3) Use momentum to set new goals. Once you establish a habit, use that progress to tell yourself “I accomplished this thing, I know I can do more.” Then figure out what you want out of life next, and set your sights on it. One thing at a time, start knocking goals down by building habits to reach them, and keep building momentum.
4) Here are some fundamentals of habit building (hat tip to James Clear of Atomic Habits):
* Cues and Triggers: If you want to meditate, place your meditation cushion by your bed so you see it first thing in the morning.
* Habit Stacking: Link your new habit to an existing, well-established habit. Formula: “After I [current habit], I will [new habit].”
* Track Your Progress , mark off each day–seeing your progress visually can be incredibly motivating.
* “Never Miss Twice” Rule: don’t beat yourself up. Just make sure you don’t miss two days in a row.
Your practical takeaway
So you say to yourself: I want to recover from addiction, I want to avoid meetings, what do I actually do?
A suggested starting point would be to, after you have detoxed and established sobriety:
1) Write in a journal every day.
2) Exercise daily.
3) Meditate daily.
4) Message or text at least 1 or 2 friends each day and check in with them.
5) Be in therapy and have regular 1 on 1 sessions scheduled.
Then, based on the fact that you are attempting to recover “against the odds and shunning traditional recovery methods by avoiding meetings,” vow to adhere strictly to these assignments, in order to give yourself a fighting chance at success.
You need to create the daily habits that will protect you from the threat of relapse.
This is Introverted Recovery.
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