Our work impacts many areas of our life. Work consumes a large portion of our available time. Many times it involves juggling commitments to children and other family members. Work usually involves a different social group from our friends. Work usually involves dealing with expectations of co-workers, superiors, customers and deadlines. Work involves money, prestige, and self-worth. Work may involve late shifts, travel, boredom and monotony.
The time consumed by work and itâ??s location will ultimately impact these areas as well:
Exercise
Personal Growth and Reading
Meditation
Hobbies and relaxation

So work impacts the quality of our core relationships, our peer group, our finances, our physical health, our sleep patterns and our ability to grow and learn. Controlling and removing the stresses from these areas of our lives is the main component of any relapse prevention plan. Not controling these stresses will lead to renewed or continuing drug use. Without meaningful work that fits into your life plan it may be very difficult if not impossible to prevent relapse! Work touchs on all the emotion triggers that cause or perpetuate drug and substance abuse. Work and the time it consumes will effect all the techniques and areas of growth anybody touched on while in a drug or alcohol rehab. What all this means is work may be a souce of fundamental strength in your life, or may be a fundamental problem.
If you find meaningful life affirming work, you won’t need as many stress reduction techniques in your life. Less stress means a decreased chance of returning to drug abuse and a recurrance of the addiction. In most drug rehab programs the final phase of treatment always includes a component on work. It is just that necessary. The next several days here will be on ideas on how to find and keep meaning work in your life. It may seem strange in a discussion about drug rehab and addiction, but again in this site we want to talk about the core fundamentals on how to end addiction, not just cute “sayings” to get through the day. Life is too incredible a journey to be wasted counting days.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 10:37 am and is filed under Drug Rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.