Sober Living: Developing and Maintaining a Sober Lifestyle
Sober living is about more than just staying sober – it’s about aligning your environment, lifestyle, and choices with your goals to live a better, healthier life. Many factors contribute to a person’s likelihood of staying sober or relapsing, whether in the form of healthy or unhealthy coping mechanisms, the presence or absence of stress, and a supportive or negative social network. The goal is to tilt the balance of all these factors in the individual’s favor in order to stay sober long-term, and to build a lifestyle that supports a holistic sense of health – physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
Sober Living Homes: The Right Environment for Sobriety
Job one of any sober living facility is ensuring that the individual’s environment actually supports long-term sobriety. Sober living homes offer a prime example of such a setting, often providing access to like-minded communities of sober individuals, recovery meeting groups, convenient exercise facilities, and other resources that can make a big difference on the path to continued sobriety. Their drug and alcohol-free settings allow individuals to develop and practice life skills and forge meaningful relationships, free from the temptations of substance use.
Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Health: Practices to Promote a Sober Life
Stress is a major risk factor in most relapses. Therefore, stress-reducing lifestyle choices such as a healthy diet, regular exercise, and practices like yoga or meditation, can be key to maintaining sobriety.[1] A nutritious diet ensures the body receives the nutrients it may not have received when malnourished due to the effects of alcoholism or drug abuse.[2] Exercise provides countless benefits to the body and mind, with studies demonstrating significant improvements to overall quality of life in alcohol-dependent individuals.[3] Practices such as yoga or meditation can decrease levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, decreasing the risk of relapse and giving the individual a sense of spiritual peace and emotional control.[4]
Life Skills: Finances and Employment
Another aspect of sober living is the development of basic life skills, whether in the form of financial responsibility or how to find and maintain employment. Many books, classes, and resources exist and can be made available for developing financial awareness and responsibility, which help individuals avoid precarious and stressful positions that make relapse more likely. Similarly, many outlets exist where individuals can get career advice and help on developing useful skills for the workplace.
Nurturing Relationships with Those Who Support Sobriety
It’s imperative that people in early recovery identify which people in one’s life are supportive of bettering one’s self and which are not. Being surrounded by the right or wrong people can make or break recovery. Positive relationships can help individuals find meaning, purpose, and contentment, and are often a powerful source of emotional support. Sober living also means living in accordance with one’s responsibilities to others, treating them with respect, honoring commitments, and putting the work into making healthy, supportive relationships last.
Bay Area Sober Services’ Sober Living Homes
Bay Area Sober Services’ Sober Living Safe Houses are designed to provide the ideal environment in which to live a sober life. We offer many amenities and services, such as a gym membership, yoga and meditation classes, dietary guidance, and beautiful group and individual rooms in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. With 12-Step and other recovery meeting groups nearby, our Sober Living Safe Houses are peaceful, luxurious homes perfect for anyone seeking to maintain sobriety, develop and practice new life skills, and live a better, fulfilling life of purpose.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788822/
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.497.2894&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07347324.2016.1113109
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106278/