Even after recovery, one still has to beware of urges which can reverse the entire
recovery process. Here are some useful tips to help you cope with urges
when they do occur.
Keep the urge at a distance
Think of the negative consequences
Engage in distracting activity
Record your urges
Bring out urges
Remember, avoidence is a temporary crutch
Know, substitutes only reinforce the orginal urge
Cope with your problem
Identify high-risk situations
Use coping skills early on
Create barriers to cut habits
Develope positive life styles
Keep the urge at a distance
When an urge occurs, accept it, but keep it at a distance. Experience it as you would experience thought. In through one ear, out through the other. Detach yourself from it, and observe and study it as an outside object for a moment. Then return your attention to what you were previously doing. If the urge is intense, remember (and perhaps picture) your benefits of stopping/cutting back. Recall a `moment of clarity,' a moment when changing your addictive behavior seemed almost without question the right course of action.
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Think of the negative consequences
Think your addictive behavior through to the end: When an urge is present, you tend to think only of the benefits of the addiction. But completing the image to include the negative consequences that follow, you will get an accurate view of the whole scenario.
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Engage in distracting activity
If the urge is very intense, engage yourself in a distracting activity, one which you have enjoyed before and which will take your mind off the urge. Otherwise, use a specific distraction technique, such as counting things (e.g., leaves on a plant, books on a shelf), doing arithmetic (e.g., continually subtracting 7 from 1000, 993, 986, etc.), or focusing on alphabetical/verbal games (e.g., saying the alphabet backwards, reading signs backwards, searching book titles or license plates for the alphabet, etc.).
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Engage in high speed activity
Any simple activity conducted at high speed can fill up your attention, thereby allowing no attention for the urge. Any thought or activity on which you completely focus your attention is all that is needed, because if no attention is paid to the urge, then it will no longer exist. Although another urge may come along at any point, that urge also can be dealt with in a similar fashion. Over time, the urges come less frequently.
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Record your urges
To help discover for yourself some of the basic facts about your own urges, it is helpful to keep an Urge Log to record all your urges. Record the date and time, the peak intensity (on a 1-10 scale), the duration, what seemed to give rise to the urge (e.g., feeling down, fight with a co-worker, just came out of the blue, etc.), and, if you engage in the addictive behavior, to what extent you did so, and your reactions to this (e.g., I hated myself, I felt good at first but bad later, I was confused, etc.). Reviewing this log is often a significant part of early psychotherapy sessions. The information on what gives rise to the urge can be used to identify ``high risk" situations.
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Bring out urges
To keep yourself in practice for coping with urges, it is useful to
``bring out urges" deliberately, rather than wait for them to occur. By remembering
past good times with your addictive behavior, or by being around
certain individuals, places, or things, you can probably bring out an urge,
and then practice coping with it. This is just like someone who is eating five or six times per day has less opportunity to develop strong hunger than someone who eats only once or twice.
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Remember, avoidance is a temporary crutch
Although it may be useful to avoid certain places, persons, or situations at first, ultimately avoidance is not a useful strategy. You can avoid everything that you think is risky, but nevertheless still experience urges which seem to come ``from out of the blue". Avoiding situations may also restrict your life in ways which are probably not helpful to your overall goals in life. Avoidance is at best a temporary (though perhaps useful) crutch.
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Know, substitutes only reinforce the orginal urge
Some addicts attempt some sort of substitution,
such as eating celery (low calorie) every time you get an urge
to overeat (high calorie). Although the substitute may seem like
a safer addiction than the original one, nevertheless
you are still reinforcing the original urge, and essentially living
in fear of it. Typically the substitute breaks down, with no gains
in urge coping skills.
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Cope with your problem
Another key issue for most recovering addicts is coping with
problems previously coped with by the addiction. These can include
problems worthy of psychotherapy in their own right. Often,
the majority of addiction treatment -- once the cost/benefit
analysis is conducted and urge coping is taught -- is focused
on learning how to cope with these problems. In many cases one or more
problems pre-exist the addiction, and are a predisposing factor for it.
Thus there may be ``bigger" problems than the addiction itself. So learn to cope with them.
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Identify high risk situations
A useful way to identify what these may be, is to identify
your high risk situations. These are the situations, places,
persons, moods, activities, or conflicts that you suspect will
give you difficulty in your plan to abstain or cut back.
Most addicts are very able to specify what these are. Rather
than using this information in a pessimistic fashion
(``I know I won't be able to pass up a drink if I'm out with Joe"),
use this information as an opportunity to develop the additional
coping skills you need to get through the difficulty.
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Use coping skills early on
It is also important to remember as you work on developing these coping skills that even though they are not yet fully developed, you can nevertheless use your urge coping techniques. For instance, suppose arguments with your spouse are a high risk situation for you, and the two of you are still working on preventing and moderating them. Even though you have a terrible fight, and are very upset about the fact that these fights are still occurring, you can nevertheless cope effectively with the urge that the fight gives rise to.
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Create barriers to cut habits
Interrupting unconscious habit patterns is typically not difficult, and can usually be accomplished by putting a barrier between oneself and whatever one uses for the addiction (food, credit cards, gaming devices, etc). In the process of overcoming a big enough barrier, there is enough time to experience an urge, which can then be coped with using one of the methods already described.
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Develop positive life styles
Ultimately, the development of a lifestyle filled with positive addictions is the best safeguard against a return to strong negative addictions. The benefits of stopping/cutting back, can provide initial guidance for positive addictions to work on. For instance, if one of your benefits is ``physical health", you could now consider other habits which could contribute to obtaining this goal. You may wish to exercise more, sleep more, or eat better. As new health habits become more deeply woven into your life, you may also find yourself getting from them the benefits you previously sought from your addiction (e.g., feeling good about myself; having more energy).
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