For many people, starting the new year off with a hefty list of New Year’s resolutions just makes sense, but for someone in recovery from a substance use disorder, things like weight loss or saving more money can seem pretty trivial. About 40% of the population participates in forming resolutions these days, but a mere...
How many times have you thought about starting a diet or quitting nicotine or caffeine without doing anything about it? Or lapsed back into bad habits after hitting a speed bump on the road to lifelong addiction recovery? Understanding the stages of change can help you in achieving your goals, particularly when overcoming your destructive...
International Overdose Awareness Day (IOAD) is a global event held on August 31st each year and aims to raise awareness of substance overdose and reduce the stigma of a drug-related death. It also acknowledges the grief felt by families and friends remembering those who have met with death or permanent injury as a result of...
It’s September, and there will be social drinking events. You’ve just started the semester and already you’re beginning to feel that heaviness and exhaustion that is synonymous with relentlessly working toward an education. Maybe it’s been a week or a month and the pressure is beginning to really set in. Pressure from tuition and project...
If you’ve made the decision to get help for drug or alcohol abuse, you’ve conquered one of the toughest challenges on the road to recovery. Before you begin your journey of learning how to live a sober lifestyle, you need to have a clean, substance-free system. Most addiction treatment programs begin with a medically-supervised detox to...
There are some addiction rehab centers that insist they can cure alcohol and drug addiction. Is this claim realistic? Can drug and/or alcohol addiction be permanently cured? Extensive research attributes addiction largely to changes in brain structure and function. Because these changes make it much harder for the addict to control substance use, health experts...
You tell yourself you don’t have a drinking problem. You don’t drink every day, but when you do drink, you can really “put it away.” That’s OK, right? Wrong. Though occasional binge drinking may seem harmless, overindulging is responsible for 10,076 people being killed in 2013 in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, or nearly one-third of all...
