How to Prevent Your Baggage from Ruining Your Rehab Experience

You won’t enter addiction treatment when you are at your best. Your addiction will have left you isolated. Your body will be malnourished, in many cases, and missing important vitamins. Your brain chemistry will have been changed by your substance use disorder. Thinking through difficult concepts can leave you frustrated and confused; you may only be able to think in black and white, unable to operate in the grey.

This is exactly the sort of context that makes emotions take over. You will have kneejerk reactions and feel overwrought and want to act out. When people are emotional, they tend to fall back on their baggage. Suddenly, things you haven’t thought about in ages crop up. You act on automatic from behaviors that you have carted around with you for years without thinking about.

All people have baggage. For some people, it’s a small carry-on and for others, it is a black Hefty bag dragging on the ground. Baggage is just a collection of issues that you constantly carry with you. When you are exhausted and emotionally depleted, you are likely to open your bag up and begin throwing its contents out everywhere.

How do you stop doing that? Well, there isn’t one universal solution. A lot of your baggage will be worked through in therapy. Proceeding in your recovery will make some of it less heavy. And, getting healthy mentally and physically will allow you to set some of the baggage down and move on without it. But, it isn’t easy.

When you are looking into treatment centers, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed and fall back on negative behaviors. Let experts help you with the process. We can help you find rehab programs that will give you the understanding and support that you need. Call 800-256-3490.

Utilizing mental health services in rehab will help you cope with emotional baggage.

Emotional Well-Being

The goal is to develop a sense of emotional well-being. Cognition (or thinking) and emotion are connected to each other and they both inform and impact one another. When you are able to achieve positive emotional well-being, you are able to more thoroughly think about the world around you and arrive at positive, grounded decision making.

The Department of Health and Human Services declares positive mental health allows you to:

• Realize your full potential
• Cope with the pressures of your life
• Work effectively
• Make significant contributions to your community

Every one of those is something that will enhance your drug and alcohol treatment program. But, how do you get to this point?

Diet

It may seem counterintuitive to focus on your physical health to help you deal with an emotional difficulty, but your general health has a huge impact on your ability to regulate your emotions and the way you react to baggage.

What you eat has a direct impact on your mood and your energy level. This means you need to get enough of each essential nutrient, eat from each of the major food groups, get enough calories to maintain a healthy weight, and avoid too much sugar, salt, and fat.

If you are in an inpatient program, dietary needs will be covered by the rehab center. If you are doing outpatient treatment, you need to be vigilant about what you eat.

Stress

Your addiction will place stress on your body and it will take some time in treatment to help relieve that, but you can make sure that you limit other stress, in order to help you avoid unloading your baggage.

Stress is often the result of illness and disease, so be sure to get a medical check-up and to manage any negative health condition you are dealing with on top of your substance use disorder. If you are in inpatient treatment, you will get care while you are at rehab. You may also get some general health care from outpatient care. Regardless, it is your responsibility to keep yourself healthy.

Be aware of stress symptoms and give yourself a break when you feel them coming on.

• Sleep problems
• Headaches
• Trouble with concentration
• Short-temper
• Stomach upsets
• Dissatisfaction with work/school
• Low morale
• Anxiety
• Depression

Try to get mental health care, as well.

By getting your body in shape, you increase your emotional well-being, which allows you to deal with baggage more logically and with more control. To find a treatment center that can help you with your addiction and your overall well-being, call us at 800-256-3490.

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