Addiction, Recovery, Change by Adams Recovery Center

Author:Adams Recovery Center
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: KiCam Projects
Published: 2016-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

• What are the benefits of being alone vs. remaining in an unhealthy relationship?

• What protests do you think you might hear from family or friends?

• How can you counter their complaints or accusations?

chapter five

Battling Boredom

A lot of people, once they are sober, report being bored. This is ironic, because boredom is one of the reasons people list when they start using drugs. The boredom reported has been described as lasting a “painfully long amount of time” and “minutes seem like years.” A lot of people can’t stand their lives to one degree or another, so they start abusing substances. Boredom serves only to amplify that.

Now, here you are, out of treatment, ready to face the world. You’re working on yourself, you’re working to build sober supports, you’re working to distance yourself from toxic relationships…and you’re finding you can’t handle the boredom. You have a lot of time on your hands and nothing to do. Much worse, you have almost nobody with whom to pass the time.

Boredom usually starts with some sort of restlessness. You might find it difficult to sit still, read, watch television, or do anything that requires less from you than running at full speed. This restlessness is so intense that there’s a strong desire to go full throttle at something just to alleviate the overwhelming sense of nothingness happening in your life. What do most people do at this point? They become busy. They engage in all sorts of activities and do as much as possible, all so the boredom won’t take hold.

Unfortunately, this has a major drawback.

Think about when someone is grieving, especially when there’s a death involved. One of the most common pieces of advice is, “Just get busy and stay busy.” Although this might sound helpful, it really tells the person to distract himself instead of dealing with his grief. As long as you stay busy, we reason, you have no time to feel sad. You’ll be doing far too much to think about your loss.

This is a deadly trap for people who believe staying busy equals being healthy. Consider someone who goes on vacation because she needs a break from her busy life. She spends a tremendous amount of time planning the trip. She has to hurry home, make reservations for her flight, book a rental car, get a hotel room lined up, plan an itinerary, rush to the airport, rush from one flight to the connecting flight, spend time standing in lines to get her rental car, drive to her hotel, unpack, get a few hours of sleep so she can be up at 5 a.m. to make all of her itinerary stops, rush around to see all the sights, check out of her hotel at the end of her trip, return her rental car, rush to the airplane terminal, rush to the connecting flight back home, and then flop down on her bed exhausted from the vacation she took to unwind!

You cannot relax if you are rushing. Similarly, you cannot diminish your grief if you never spend time grieving.

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