Tips to Building Resilience in Recovery

Resiliency offers a landing pad for someone who has the skill figured out. Building resiliency can help an individual bounce back from adversity and perhaps even become happier, smarter, stronger and healthier than you were before.

Breaking it down, resilience is defined as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands (source: American Psychological Association).

The question is, how does an individual go about building resilience in the face of recovery? Let’s look at a few tips to build resilience in recovery.

1. Build a Strong Support Network: Having a strong support network helps an individual feel connected by increasing your feeling of accountability and resilience in the face of challenges. Your support network is a source of moral support, practical support and good advice from individuals who have been on the same journey.
2. Expect that there will be ups and downs: Recovery is not a straight journey upward. There will be challenges, set backs and hiccups on your journey to sobriety.
3. Take care of yourself: Prioritizing your health is key to building resilience in early recovery. Sleep is particularly important because sleep deprivation or chronic sleep deficit erodes your resilience on two fronts: the parts of your brain responsible for identifying threats become overactive and the parts of your brain responsible for emotional regulation, attention and problem-solving become under active.
4. Always look for the silver lining: It is important that when a setback happens – even something small – to find something good about it, even if it seems slightly absurd. This outlook helps you take on a new perspective and maintain the balance required to continue uphill.
5. Affirm your values: Self-affirmation is important to helping an individual in recovery better cope with negative feedback and make healthier decisions in general. As an example, a simple way to do this is to set aside ten minutes a day to journal about your core values and why they matter to you.

Resilience is key to Recovery

Resilience is not a special trait that only some are born with while others are left to struggle without. Resilience is something we can all build up on our own. Just as we use the gym and specific exercises to build our muscles, following some of the tips above can help individuals build resilience and succeed in recovery.

Get support today

If you or someone you love is in need of substance recovery support, reach out to us at 920-903-9337 or by filling out the contact form on our website.