How to Cope With Cravings in Recovery

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How to Cope With Cravings in Recovery

According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), craving is a strong, urgent, or abnormal desire for a certain substance or activity. There are many different forms of craving, like food cravings, craving addictive substances, or in some cases, craving inedible things. When you think of cravings, you may think of unusual pregnancy cravings or craving chocolate during menstruation, which seem relatively harmless. Whereas addictive cravings in recovery, when left unaddressed, can be detrimental to your well-being.

At Rancho Recovery, we know how important knowledge and understanding are for addiction treatment and recovery. Thus, we are committed to providing a luxury drug rehab to help you address your cravings in recovery. Through tailored treatment strategies, we can help you build the tools you need to manage cravings in recovery and strengthen lifelong recovery. 

Recovery from a drug addiction does not start and end with treatment. No matter where you are on your recovery journey, we are with you every step as you become the healthiest and the most fulfilling version of yourself. Cravings in recovery should not stop you from leading a fulfilling life in recovery. Thus, at Rancho Recovery, we are here to support and guide you in healing the whole of your parts with holistic care.

However, you may question how you can recognize your addiction cravings in recovery. How do you prevent cravings in recovery from disrupting all the work you have done for your sobriety? With more awareness and understanding of addiction cravings in recovery, you can maintain your recovery. Through insight into cravings, you will learn that cravings in recovery are not something to be ashamed of as a part of your journey. 

What Are Cravings in Addiction?

A common feature of substance use disorder (SUD) and relapse is craving substances. As noted in Discover Mental Health, craving is the only diagnostic feature that is part of both early and sustained remission. Thus, experiencing cravings in addiction and cravings in recovery is a typical part of anyone’s recovery journey. In fact, it is not uncommon to experience strong cravings in early recovery and years into your recovery. 

Yet, how do cravings in recovery form? What process has led you to continue experiencing cravings in recovery? More knowledge on how substances impact your brain can provide insight into why cravings are part of recovery. Your brain is a complex organ at the center of all activities, basic functioning, and your sense of self. Across your life, your brain goes through fundamental periods of development. 

Infancy, early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood are often the critical periods of brain development. Through the critical periods of brain development, the basic structure of your brain and the formation and refinement of neural networks occurs. It is through those critical periods that you form important connections for functioning. As stated in “Brain Development” from First Things First, building upon brain connections allows you to move, think, and communicate in more complex ways. 

You not only learn how to communicate, but you also discover important skills like motivation, self-regulation, and problem-solving. Thus, the complexities of those linking brain connections are the foundation and continual process for fostering healthy, capable, and successful adults. However, substance misuse and abuse can disrupt and impair those critical periods of brain development. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), substance misuse and abuse interfere with how neurons send, receive, and process signals through neurotransmitters. 

Moreover, different types of drugs interfere with neuron signals in different ways. Drugs like marijuana and heroin end up sending abnormal messages through your network. Whereas drugs like amphetamine or cocaine impact neurotransmitters or transporters. Stimulants can cause your neurons to release abnormally large amounts of neurotransmitters or interfere with transporters to prevent normal recycling of brain chemicals. Thus, drug use can alter and impair different areas of your brain function. Some functions that can be impacted include:

  • The formation of habits and routines
  • Positive forms of motivation
  • Increase experiencing distressing feelings like anxiety
  • Your ability to think, plan, problem-solve, and make decisions
  • Ability to engage in impulse control

Now, you may question what impairments to functioning, like forming habits, tell you about cravings in recovery. Understanding cravings in recovery relates to pleasure and the reward center of your brain. You experience pleasure when you do something you enjoy, like eating or spending time with loved ones. Feeling pleasure is how your brain typically identifies and reinforces beneficial behaviors. 

You get a burst of dopamine that tells you to repeat the behavior over and over again until it becomes a habit. Drugs also use dopamine but on a larger scale, which reinforces substance use as pleasure. The consumption and activities you do in relation to your drug use create cues that enact your craving for that pleasure. Therefore, cravings are born out of drug-induced changes to the brain and the habit of use triggered by cues related to using substances. Looking at the way drugs impact the brain’s reward center and cues highlight the need to understand triggers. A deeper understanding of triggers in addiction can offer insight into the roots of your cravings in recovery. 

Understanding Triggers in Addiction

As the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) notes, triggers are the internal or external cues you associate with past substance use. The cues or triggers you experience activate the urge or craving to consume that substance or substances. Moreover, as stated in JAMA Psychiatry, when cues are repeatedly presented during your drug use, they become linked with those drugs and drug-related actions. Thus, it creates a conditioned response or habit in which you crave the substance anytime you encounter its related cues. 

The creation of a habit loop, which encompasses the elements, cue, routine, and reward, is the foundation for difficult-to-break habits. Not only does the habit loop increase substance-seeking behavior, but it also impedes treatment adherence, retention, and recovery. Whether you are still actively using substances, in treatment, early recovery, or long-term recovery, cues toward substance use are still present. Further, the cues of addiction that enact cravings in recovery can be detrimental when left unaddressed. 

Yet, how can you address cravings in recovery to support lasting recovery? How do you recognize your triggers for cravings? Everyone’s cravings in recovery are unique to them and their experiences. However, listed below are some common cues or triggers that can contribute to cravings in recovery:

  • Excessive stress
  • Emotional dysregulation
  • Seeing images of drugs 
    • Movies depicting drug use
  • Paraphernalia used to produce, conceal, and consume substances
    • Bongs
    • Small spoons
    • Pipes made from different materials like wood, glass, metal, plastic, and ceramic
    • Cigarette papers
  • Being in environments with substances
    • Bars
    • Social events: Holiday parties and weddings
  • Seeing people you use to consume substances with
  • Interacting with people who still abuse substances
  • Relationships with family and friends who do not respect your sobriety
    • A friend brings over a bottle of wine
    • Family members offer you a drink at a family gathering
  • Returning to environments where you used to consume substances
  • Remembering the pleasure you associate with your past substance use

The multitude of potential triggers for cravings in recovery and relapse showcases the challenge of cravings. 

Challenges of Cravings in Recovery

Taking steps to seek help and putting in the work toward abstinence from substances takes courage and commitment to try. Experiencing cravings in recovery can add another understandably frustrating layer of challenge to recovery. As the NIDA notes, drug cravings increase and highlight their challenge as it increases your risk of relapse. In addition, cravings hinder your ability to break out of the habit loop of cues in addiction. Listed below are some of the other challenges that come with cravings in recovery:

  • Cravings can lead to intense preoccupation with the substance or how it makes you feel
    • Impairs your ability to think about anything else
  • During a craving episode, you may feel like you cannot live without the substance or substances
  • Exposure to external and internal cues leads to the release of dopamine to the reward circuits in your brain
    • Motivates you to seek out and use the substance or substances
      • The intensity of craving-driven motivation can override your desire not to use substances
  • Brain circuits that help facilitate cravings can persist beyond detox, abstinence, and long-term recovery
  • The long-term nature of cravings in recovery can be impacted by the type of substance or substances you consumed
    • Uncertainty over how long you will continue to have cravings years into recovery can be distressing
  • Some acute cravings can last as long as 20 minutes
    • Having 20-minute-long intense and frequent cravings throughout your days and weeks can chip away at your resilience and psychological well-being
  • Your cravings are highly subjective and individualized
    • The intensity, frequency, and types of triggers you experience are unique to you
      • Seeing a character use drugs in a movie may be a trigger for you, but not a peer

In addition to the physical challenges of cravings, it is important to recognize the psychological strain experiencing cravings can put on you. The intensity of a craving episode can be exhausting, but that exhaustion does not start and end with a craving episode. You can continue to feel the strain of your cravings after the episode subsides. Challenges with addiction and the stigma of addiction already come with a host of negative thoughts and feelings about yourself. 

As stated in Plos One, negative self-conscious emotions like shame and guilt are common in substance use. Shame is a negative evaluation of yourself that erodes your sense of self-worth and self-esteem as you buy into negative self-beliefs. In comparison, guilt is a negative evaluation of your behavior. Both guilt and shame can contribute to adaptive and maladaptive responses. Listed below are some of the adaptive and maladaptive responses that can come with guilt and shame in addiction: 

  • Guilt-proneness and guilt without shame: Tendency to feel bad about a specific behavior
    • Increase empathy
    • Support adherence to treatment
    • Encourage responsibility and accountability for your actions and behavior
    • Reparative response
      • Encourages apologizing
    • Supports repairing relationships
    • Protective and harm-avoidant behaviors
      • Supports limiting substance intake
      • Improves ability to not exceed a certain amount of a substance
  • Shame-proneness: Tendency to feel about about yourself
    • Avoidant or maladaptive response
      • Higher chance of relapse
    • Positive or adaptive response
      • Staying in SUD treatment for a longer period
      • Empowered to heal by your perception of your ability to repair a positive sense of self
    • Higher rates of substance use, misuse, and SUD

Therefore, when left to fester without support, shame and guilt can further distressing thoughts and feelings about your cravings in recovery. Your cravings may increase feelings of shame and guilt, especially in recovery. You may think you are failing or weak because of your cravings in recovery. However, you are not weak or failing because substance use disorder (SUD) is a real disorder, and cravings are a natural part of the process. Recovery is not reliant on only positives and challengeless days. Rather, recovery is filled with peaks and valleys that can be celebrated and overcome with support.

Further, looking at some of the challenges that come with cravings in recovery showcases the need for individualized support. Treatment and recovery should address your substance use and the unique triggers you may experience in recovery. Understanding your external and internal cues can provide guidance on how to manage your cravings for your well-being and recovery.

Ways to Manage Triggers and Cravings in Recovery

An important step in managing triggers for cravings is learning how to recognize your cues. With support from your clinician, you can learn to recognize and understand the triggers that enact your cravings in recovery. Understanding your thoughts, feelings, and memories associated with SUD can help you build tools to cope with triggers and cravings. Listed below are some of the ways you can manage and cope with your triggers and cravings in recovery:

  • Triggers
    • Keep substances out of your household
    • Avoid activities and environments where consumption of the substance is common or encouraged
    • Engage in alternative activities that do not involve the substance
    • Coping with unavoidable triggers
      • Try to leave the situation if you can
      • Talk to a trusted person or bring that trusted person with you
      • Distract yourself with healthy alternative activities during the situation
        • Text or call a trusted person
        • Watch short videos
        • Listen to music
        • Do a hobby like painting or gardening
    • Keep a journal of your triggers
    • Challenge negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts
    • Learn to set healthy boundaries
      • Stop going to places where the substance is easy to access
      • End relationships with individuals who still abuse substances and or pressure you to
    • Continue to educate yourself on the chemistry of addiction and cravings
    • Seek advice and support from trusted individuals
      • Peers in group therapy and other support groups
      • Mentor
      • Close family and friends
    • Spend time with loved ones
  • Cravings
    • Keep a journal to track and analyze your urges
      • Increases awareness of when and how you experience cravings
      • Helps you recognize what triggered the cravings
      • Support understanding how to avoid triggers
    • Remind yourself why you sought treatment 
    • Go for a meditative walk
    • Practice deep breathing
    • Talk to your clinician to find out if pharmaceutical intervention is right for you
      • Suboxone may be effective in reducing opioid cravings
    • Engage in physical exercise
      • Yoga
      • Go on a bike ride
      • Jogging
    • Remind yourself that cravings are temporary
    • Engage in meditation and or prayer

Thus, ways you can cope with triggers and cravings highlight awareness and support as key tools for lasting recovery.

Finding Holistic Personalized Care for Cravings in Recovery at Rancho Recovery

At Rancho Recovery, we know supporting lasting recovery starts with holistic substance abuse treatment. When you have access to holistic, personalized care, you can build tools to manage triggers and cravings in recovery. A person-centered approach coupled with evidence-based treatments provides guidance and support for self-awareness and self-understanding. Self-awareness is invaluable to lasting recovery as you uncover the roots of your difficulties. Challenges with triggers and cravings can leave you feeling deeply ashamed and guilty, which eats at your resilience. 

The distress of cravings, especially when they continue after treatment, can convince you that you are not worthy of healing. Yet, we know that everyone is worthy of the opportunity for healing. Holistic, individualized care can give you the space to recognize that you are not unusual in experiencing cravings. Therefore, we are committed to meeting you where you are to heal as a whole person. With our small client group at our luxury rehab, we can give you the attention and support you deserve. Recovery is a lifelong journey, and our Christian-based recovery programs can help you thrive in and beyond treatment.

The distress you experience from triggers and cravings in recovery can convince you that lasting recovery is not possible for you. It can be difficult to think about anything other than using substances. In addition, the intensity and frequency of cravings long after treatment can increase negative self-beliefs and contribute to relapse. However, with more insight into how and why triggers happen, you can better understand yourself to form adaptive coping strategies for your triggers and cravings. Moreover, access to holistic, personalized care gives you the support you need to overcome cravings in treatment and recovery. Therefore, at Rancho Recovery, we are committed to providing luxury whole-person care for long-term recovery. Call us at (877) 484-1447 to learn more today.

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