Yoga as Complementary Therapy for Addiction Recovery
It’s estimated that one in three Americans suffer or have suffered from a substance abuse disorder.
Similarly, to other psychological disorders, if left untreated addiction can persist for years and can manifest itself with periods of remission and relapse. Since the risk of relapse is so big, we at the Arizona Addiction Recovery Center incorporate complementary therapies, such as yoga and mindfulness, so that you can maintain a lifelong recovery and sobriety.
Yoga is a positive way to handle negative emotions, anxiety, and depression. Yoga helps people experience all kinds of positive feelings that they didn’t normally experience in their everyday life.
Yoga teaches you techniques that can be put into actual use when you face sudden stress and temptation. You can use these techniques anywhere and anytime.
How Can Yoga Benefit Your Recovery?
Yoga incorporates directed body postures, meditation and focused breathing to help strengthen your health and ease cravings and substance abuse withdrawal symptoms. At the Arizona Addiction Recovery Center, our professional and experienced therapists help patients with their addiction recovery by showing them all the positive benefits of this ancient healing art.
Here are some of those benefits:
- Achieve Inner PeaceNot only does yoga help you increase your flexibility and release all that built up tension, but it also has tons of spiritual and mental benefits. Combining strengthening and stretching poses will allow you to release your stress better than with any other kind of exercise.
- Relapse PreventionRelapse triggers are everywhere, and they can both have mental and physical components. Once you establish a challenging, comfortable yoga practice, you can practice it anywhere. Yoga strengthens both the physical and mental components and helps people enter recovery much faster.
- Pain and Stress Relief
While all yoga poses have a calming influence, there are some particular poses that will teach you that have an even greater ability to help you de-stress and release your tension. Yoga based recovery helps addiction recovery clients that are possibly dealing with pain or withdrawal symptoms.Practicing yoga for just a couple of minutes a day can help you become more aware of your body. This awareness can help you bring yourself into alignment and balance. - Self-disciplineYoga based recovery has become very popular in the past decade. It helps you learn self-discipline and learn how to control your impulses, especially when it comes to drug or alcohol use.
- Spiritual Community
Yoga helps you learn how to slow down, and how to live a life of acceptance and harmony. No matter which religion you belong to, with yoga you’ll be able to understand spirituality in a whole new level and be able to heal your body, spirit and mind all at the same time. - More Energy and Better SleepSleep is a very important part of addiction recovery. Substance abuse can really disrupt the body’s natural processes and can lead to sleep deprivation and irregular sleep patterns. It’s quite normal for people to suffer from insomnia after they’ve undergone detox since their body needs the substance to fall sleep.
The best way to improve your sleep is through yoga, since it can really help improve your quality of sleep and make you fall asleep faster.
- Build ConfidenceBuilding up your self-esteem and starting to feel more confident is an important part of your recovery and can really help prevent relapse.
That’s because a lot of people start using drugs and alcohol in order to numb their negative emotions that usually come from not feeling good about yourself or your choices. When you start being negative about yourself, and start thinking that you’re not worth it or that you don’t deserve the gift of recovery, you may feel tempted to drink or use again. It’s a vicious cycle that it’s hard to get out of. Insecurity can often be the root of addictive behaviors. That’s why you need to commit to something that makes you feel good about yourself and helps you recover, which yoga can definitely do.
How Does Yoga Help in Addiction Recovery?
Yoga treats both the body and the mind of an addict.
It helps you unlock what is happening deep inside of you, in all fields including physically, spiritually and mentally.
Here are the ways in which yoga helps you with addiction recovery, and helps you avoid relapse.
- Yoga helps you focus on what you need to do in order to get sober. Yoga alone won’t do the trick, but when combined with the help of your sponsor, your therapies, meetings, medication, and private sessions you can expect to see excellent results.
- Yoga drastically improves your health while you’re helping your body clean and detox. It also helps you build a special connection with yourself no other practice can do.
- Yoga takes a lot of courage, as it opens you up to new and unknown experiences and helps you forget about your old patterns.
- And most importantly, yoga is super fun! You can see yoga as a break from all the hard work you’ve done in your recovery period. With so much emotional trauma and downfalls, yoga can be a welcome break! You should never underestimate the good and blissful feelings that you can achieve with yoga. You will soon find yourself replacing the high you were chasing before, and the bad patterns you were stuck in, with the warmth, goodness, love, and sense of community that only yoga can bring. Your body knows how to heal itself. You just need to allow it.
