What Happens After You Get Sober?

There comes a time in everyone’s sobriety when they ask themselves: what now? This may be sooner for some and later for others, but this is a question that must be answered at a certain point; it’s truly unavoidable. There are an innumerable amount of ways to answer this question, and only a few to ask it, but I hope to be able to shed a little light on how you can look for an answer. After an individual builds a solid foundation, it’s absolutely vital that they embark on that thing we call life, and seek their version of success.

Life Keeps Going

You see, the world doesn’t stop for people in recovery, and regardless of what age you are, there’s ground to make up for the time wasted in active addiction. Months, years, even decades can disappear in the midst of one’s disease, and one way to look at this “what now” question can be to catch up and clean up. Catching up and cleaning up looks different for everybody but here’s a few places to start.

• How does your credit score look? Do you even know? Checking your credit score and getting it back in order is going to be necessary to move forward in your life. Maybe you didn’t cause damage to your credit score, and that’s great, just means that it’s probably time to start building credit or at least start investigating what that looks like.
• Have you finished your education? This could be high school, college, or vocational training; the point is that it’s a good thing to consider depending on the career or life path you want to go. If you don’t have any idea which direction you want to go, community college can be a great place to find that out, and you can even finish your core credits for a fraction of the cost of a university.
• Have you made ALL of your amends? I’ve met scores of people who have slacked on their amends and the people I’ve met who are the most free of their past are the ones who finish making all of their amends. These are the people who paid back all of the money owed, and the ones who reached out to all the people they were most afraid of; they reap the most benefits spiritually.

There are many ways to catch up and clean up, and these are just a few. The important thing is having the mentality of putting your past behind you through actions to rectify it.

Sobriety and Spirituality

Don’t stop continuing to seek spiritually. There are tons of ways, hundreds of routes, and thousands of techniques to improve upon and maintain spiritual growth. You can try yoga, different meditation techniques, religious services, or even spiritual books or podcasts. The important thing is to keep seeking, and the things that work best for you may be different from somebody else. There are so many ways to answer and implement life’s greatest endeavor, that the amount of options you have to do so are nearly overwhelming. Embarking on this conquest to improve spiritually is a fun adventure that anyone can go on, and I encourage you use the internet, and other people in the program to see what has worked for them and how they found it.

Sobriety and Your Career

How does your career look? Are you in a dead-end job? Or are you on the path you want to be on? These are questions you’ll need to answer at some point, and if you’re not happy with the path you’re on then it’s time to get on a new path. I recommend doing some soul searching, and first map out where you want to be in a few years, then create a plan of how you will get there. A few steps in you might be flooded with self-doubt and want to take the easy way out, and slink back into the dead-end you we’re comfortable in before. I challenge you to push through this and press on towards your dreams!

Sobriety and Your Health

Last but not least, how is your physical health? We’ve touched on this before but it’s incredibly beneficial for one’s well being to implement a healthy lifestyle. If you’ve done a lot of physical wreckage then you can include this in your clean up list, and if not then it’s a great thing to start to improve upon. There are many ways to be healthy, but the point here is to start improving upon your physical health through good eating habits, and any type of work out regiment.

I encourage every individual in recovery to keep pushing forward, and here are just a few places to start. I’ve been told sobriety is like biking up hill, so it’s important to keep peddling forward if you don’t want to roll back. That infamous “now what” question doesn’t always have to be answered so complexly, and sometimes the best answer is to look at the current status of your life and see where and what you can improve.

Last Updated on September 11, 2024