the Red Oak Recovery<sup>®</sup> wordmark in color

Coping Skills and Recovery: Getting Used to Your New Life

Experience clinician-run addiction treatment at Red Oak Recovery® in the pristine Blue Ridge Mountains

Coping Skills and Recovery: Getting Used to Your New Life

a young man looks hopeful after learning coping skills for addiction

If you’re new to the world of recovery, congratulations! You are taking steps to live the life you and your family deserve. Equipping yourself with coping skills for addiction recovery can help you stay on track and minimize the impact of a potential relapse.

At Red Oak’s young men’s rehab program in North Carolina, we’re proud to help our clients learn the coping skills for recovery and help them stay on the path to a sober, healthy life. Call 828.382.9699 to get started today.

Who Needs Coping Skills for Recovery?

Each day, you deal with stressors. Some people may upset you in one way or another. Disappointment and discouragement are natural facts of life. You try hard, but you fail sometimes.

How you deal with these negative aspects determines, to some degree, your susceptibility to addiction. For example, if stress at work leads you to justify having a few drinks, you’re equating stress relief with alcohol. Does crippling depression make it difficult to get out of bed in the morning? Taking stimulant drugs might be your way of dealing with the problem.

However, there are other ways of dealing with the realities of life. These methods don’t involve drugs or alcohol. But if you never learned alternatives, it’s hard to imagine that they could work. That’s where addiction treatment programs can make a huge difference.

Common Coping Skills for Addiction Recovery

When you decide to make a change in your life and seek treatment, you’ll need to learn new skills to cope with the stress of everyday life. Beating addiction requires you to change the way you handle stress and tough situations. No matter how much you want to stop drug or alcohol use, you’ll need new coping strategies in place to be successful. People who are in recovery can use several different coping skills to deal with stress, including:

  • Stress management – Finding new ways to handle stress is one of the many key coping skills for addiction recovery. You will need to explore what stress management options work best for you. Some people in recovery find exercise to be helpful. Others find that engaging in a hobby, such as cooking, allows them to refocus their mind when stress-induced cravings hit.
  • Meditation – If you’ve been using drugs or alcohol to quiet your mind, the idea of sitting in silence with your thoughts can be terrifying. Meditation takes practice, and it can be a helpful tool in teaching your brain to relax. There’s no need to start with long periods. Sitting with your thoughts for as long as 60 seconds can be helpful.
  • Grounding – Grounding is a way of pausing racing thoughts to notice your environment. Finding five things that are a certain color or noticing what’s going on with each of your five senses are great ways to pull yourself out of anxious or stressful thoughts and back to reality.

Coping skills help manage the intense emotions you experience in daily life. Before, you probably tried distracting yourself with drugs or alcohol from the negativity that was going on in your life. It didn’t work. Distraction didn’t address those emotions, and instead, substance use added a new issue to the mix.

Comprehensive Therapy that Teaches Coping Skills for Substance Abuse Recovery

When you enter treatment at Red Oak Recovery®, our caring, trauma-informed staff will work with you to help you develop coping skills for addiction recovery. We understand the difficulties you may face when learning new ways to deal with stress. Our program offers several different treatment approaches that teach the skills you need to prevail on the other side of addiction, including:

We know that learning coping skills for addiction recovery can be challenging. We will be there with you every step of the way through the recovery process. Our unique treatment options will help you make the transition from addiction to recovery. It is possible to live a happy, healthy life. We are here to help you figure out how to get there.

Call Red Oak Recovery® Now

If you’re ready to change your life for the better, we’re ready to talk to you. At Red Oak Recovery®, our unique treatment program gives you coping skills for addiction recovery that can improve your chances of long-term sobriety. Call us today at 828.382.9699 or complete our online form to talk with a member of our enrollment staff and learn more about our programs. We know that it’s not easy to ask for help, and you’re taking a step in the right direction by researching treatment options. We’ll be happy to answer any questions that you have about the treatment and recovery process. A sober life is possible—you just need to reach out.