Healthy Living

Whether you are struggling with an active eating disorder, disordered eating, or negative body image, cultivating peace surrounding your body image is an important cornerstone of experiencing wellness. Learning what it means to have an accepting, compassionate, and trusting relationship with yourself and your body is needed for holistic wellness and having the self-confidence to reach your goals. No matter how long you have tried to make peace with your body, it is possible.

Living in zen doesn’t mean you need to stop talking. On the contrary, zen is a state of mind you create within yourself. We think we can’t live without something too often, but if we give ourselves a chance to enjoy the silence, we can.

We need to break out of our comfort zones to grow. Being comfortable in being uncomfortable isn’t a cliche. It is a way to motivate ourselves.

Replenishing nutrition and boosting metabolism after neglecting your body during addiction is part of the addiction recovery process. When you establish a healthy eating pattern, you allow your brain and body to get properly nourished. This boosts your recovery goals and creates a healthy habit for achieving your long-term recovery goals. What you eat while in recovery matters, as your body might have been deprived of essential nutrients during active addiction.

Therapists and sponsors play essential roles throughout the entire addiction recovery journey. They provide support, information, and a caring shoulder through even the toughest days, helping to guide through crucial turning points in each individual’s life.  It’s crucial to find the right support for a particular part of a journey. Just any sponsor or therapist will be a good fit for each individual, and there may come a time when an individual realizes that their sponsor or therapist isn’t providing the kind of care they need.  Being open to new ideas and approaches throughout one’s recovery journey is essential. It is not required that every person agree or find success in everything a sponsor or therapist suggests. Some signs may indicate the need for a change in support personnel. While the decision to fire one’s sponsor or therapist is not easy, it is paramount to understand that such a possibility exists and may be necessary for continued healing.

When applying your mind to something, you can visualize the outcome before acting upon it. Visualizing yourself in addiction recovery is vital to the success of your recovery goals. When you aim to change a habit you have in your life, visualizing the result can help you achieve it. Visualization creates positive habits and progress towards your self-growth and future, and it makes all the difference in the path to recovery.

The idea of treating addiction, mental health issues, or dual-diagnosis by addressing both dimensions in one’s recovery plan often includes having each individual make key changes for their own wellness or betterment. However, the terms “wellness” and “betterment” are often used generally, and an individual may not fully embrace what the terms entail. The path towards “wellness” and “betterment” has a few hallmark traits. Understanding what these terms include and do not include can help each individual better understand how to formulate their recovery plan throughout their journey.

Adolescents today face a world with different challenges than what adults grew up experiencing. To parents of adolescents, understanding your children’s internet habits and determining how much time spent online is too much is difficult to discern when your child’s daily lives are so deeply interwoven with it. If you are concerned about your teenager’s internet habits, understanding the warning signs of internet addiction and how your child may be affected can help you encourage a more positive relationship between your adolescent and their time online and find help if necessary. What is Internet Addiction? Just because your teenager doesn’t want to put their phone down doesn’t mean they have a full-blown internet addiction. Internet use disorder, or internet addiction, doesn’t happen unless the uncontrolled use of the internet interferes with your teen’s daily life out in the real world. The use of the internet in this disorder is not limited to just one activity but covers several different activities, including excessively using social media, blogging, gaming, gambling, or pornography. When constantly going online for one or several of these activities affects a teen’s physical health or social skills, this becomes a reason for concern of addiction. Underlying Causes Discussing internet addiction in teens can not be complete without discussing one of the major underlying causes of developing this type of addiction. Mental health conditions like depression and anxiety are an underlying thread that makes teens more susceptible to developing an internet addiction. Other co-occurring disorders may be influencing factors developing this addiction, like obsessive-compulsive disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Warning Signs in Your Teen of Internet Use Disorder

Inside all of us resides a secret weapon for healing and fostering a positive mindset, known as gratitude. When you practice gratitude, you allow yourself to notice and feel appreciation for all you have in life, not limited to material possessions but encompassing your relationships, opportunities, experiences, and feelings. Gratitude is a powerful tool to utilize in recovery because it offers a simple solution to combating any negative thinking or emotions that may fuel the urge to relapse.

Decluttering, organizing, making your bed, and keeping a clean living space seem unrelated to your mental health, but all of these things positively affect your mental state. Using these simple cleaning practices to give yourself an easy win every day will boost your mood and motivate you to succeed in other areas of your life. Sometimes engaging differently in the little things of daily life can profoundly impact your self-esteem and worldview. If you aren’t convinced of the power these simple measures can have, see below how these habits can provide a shift in your mental health.

We now recognize that cigarette smoking is not the harmless pastime that it was once touted to be. In the world of addiction recovery, it is even more important to keep a close eye on the use of nicotine and cigarette smoking. With cigarette smoking, a common companion to substance abuse, many entering into addiction recovery may think it is too overwhelming to give up smoking and drugs all at once. However, the benefits of putting down cigarettes while in addiction recovery should be a consideration.

If you or someone you love engages in self-injurious behavior, a mental illness could be the underlying cause. Finding the right help to stop self-harming and addressing any influential factors like mental illness or substance abuse is necessary since the individual lacks the impulse control to effectively stop themselves from continuing this behavior and hurting themselves.