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Lifestyle Medicine, Healthy Diet and Substance Abuse How a healthy diet helps drug and alcohol addiction In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), food is medicinal. It is all about nourishing your body, mind and spirit by building ‘jing’. This is a…
Nutritional supplements eliminate withdrawal symptoms Addiction is really an inability to stop relapsing. People relapse because guilt, anxiety, paranoia, emotional reactivity, depression, confusion, insomnia, fear and shame, on top of physical aches and pain, make life without drugs or alcohol…
How to keep your resolution to quit drugs Do you want to quit some habit or addiction but can’t because you’re always feeling demotivated and lethargic? Movement is the answer. Start moving and you will build motivation and willpower. The…
I don’t like the word ‘sobriety’, it sounds dull and lifeless. If that’s all you have to look forward to its no wonder people relapse. I reckon we should use ‘extraordinary’ as the state we want to achieve after quitting drugs or alcohol. I don’t like the use of ‘clean’ – meaning being off drugs – either. Saying you are ‘clean’ suggests that what you did before was unclean, but this is yet another outdated concept. You may have had some profound life-altering experiences on drugs and this is an asset if you use those experiences as a template for something you want to achieve again without drugs.
Depression is a common side-effect of addiction and it contributes to relapse. People quit drugs and then instead of ‘returning to normal’ they find themselves feeling empty and depressed.
This happened to me and it brought me close to suicide. If only I’d known then what I do now about the power of nutraceuticals – of Chinese herbs and nutritional supplements. See, nutrient depletion is a major contributor to depression and addicts and alcoholics are nutrient deprived. If you are an addict, drugs create the impression that all your needs have been met. This is a major attraction of getting high.
Mainstream recovery is based on talk. First you have to talk yourself out of taking drugs (“no drugs today, no drugs today”), and then talk endlessly through the relationship dramas, sexual dysfunction, depression, psychosis, panic and anxiety that may arise afterwards, not to mention the endless probing into what went wrong.