Are you aiming to have a sober 2024? Good for you, my friend. Yes yes yes! Go you.
Sobriety is so important. Your physical body can only be happy, strong, and resilient with sobriety. Your thoughts and your emotions can only heal and create positive vibrations for yourself and others with sobriety.
Your relationships can grow, change, and trend towards the positive only with sobriety. Your financials, your material life, your career, your family, your pets…everyone is better off when you’re sober.
Here are ten tips from Villa Kali Ma, ten reminders for all of us who are seeking to walk a positive path of change in our lives, whether we’ve been sober one day or one decade.
1. Revisit Your Why Frequently
In his very poignant work Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.“
Frankl was writing about the human being’s remarkable capacity to withstand adversity, and how helpful it is to have a good reason.
What are your reasons for staying sober this year?
The more compelling your why, the easier it will be for you. If you can’t remember, stop right now and journal for 7 minutes on this topic:
I commit to sobriety today because…
Here are some reasons we can think of.
We stay sober because life is better sober, in every single way.
We stay sober because we want to be in charge of our own lives.
We stay sober because of the love and gratitude for those who helped us get and stay sober.
We stay sober because we know our sobriety helps other people get and stay sober.
We stay sober because we choose to believe we matter.
What are your reasons?
2. Connect With Your Higher Power
Cultivate your relationship with a positive, benevolent life force power that you believe can and will help you stay sober.
The definition of a higher power is very broad and permissive in AA. Famously, one early member prayed to a doorknob and found it effective.
In or outside of AA circles, truthfully you are allowed to choose your own higher power as long as you understand that sobriety requires some measure of humility and relinquishment of the ego.
The false self, the conditioned self, and the ego self cannot overcome addiction, but your true loving Self-nature, the part of you that is one with all of life, can.
We can approach sobriety in a million different ways, but if we live out of alignment with the nature of life, if we are overly selfish, egoic, and unloving towards ourselves or others, we’re heading for a relapse.
Prioritize living a positive, loving life that brings no harm to others, that does unto others as we would have them do unto us, and we are turned in the right direction (towards God, or whatever we want to call it).
3. Stay Connected With Your Recovery Community
It’s important to prioritize sobriety every day. One easy way to make this a strong habit is to make sure you stay connected with other positive recovering people. These people help you remember the sneaky dangers of addiction, to stay cautious and smart in the face of the very real dangers of relapse.
A suggestion for starting in 2024 is to complete a time-based recovery challenge, such as attending 30 meetings in 30 days. Alternatively, you can make goals related to recovery tasks, such as working through the 12 Steps with a sponsor this year (even if we’ve done them before).
4. Do Your Healing Work
Underlying traumatization are serious risk for relapse, so it’s important to make sure we get help. If you know you have struggles staying and being happy in your skin – as so many of us do, that’s why we were addicts in the first place, isn’t it? – make sure you’re actively involved in your healing.
This can take many forms. Perhaps you’re working on yourself in psychotherapy, in a therapy group, or receiving a series of treatments targeting your trauma. Maybe you’re taking a yoga teacher training or doing a healing art project. The important thing is to keep one foot in the waters of healing so that this stays alive and awake in you.
5. Socialize With Sober People
A lot of sobriety is just staying away from places and people who might offer us alcohol and drugs. The addict within will tell us this means we have to live a boring, isolated life, but that’s not true. Addiction leads us to that, not sobriety.
If you’re feeling a failure of imagination about this, see if you can come up with a list of 12 things that sound fun to try with others, that don’t involve any substances.
- take a gardening class
- go to a meet-up for hiking
- plan a board game night with my sober friends
Could you put something from your list on the calendar for early 2024?
6. Take Care of Your Physical Body and Health
Feeling good in the body is a large part of happiness.
Prioritize your physical health, by eating an abundance of healthy fresh, and ideally home-cooked foods in enough but still moderate amounts. Exercise, in a variety of ways, frequently. Stretch, go for long walks, do something for cardio, and something that builds your strength.
If it feels doable this year, stay away from screens, sugar, and caffeine. The body doesn’t like these things. The body likes moving, breathing fresh air, playing, and being in nature.
7. Get a Hobby
The human being loves to learn and loves to be creative. If you feel like you’re not sure what to do with yourself or you’re not too excited about anything these days, consider getting a hobby.
If there is something you’ve always wanted to try, or which you admire others for having the courage to learn how to do, give yourself a window of time, such as three months, just to explore, with no attachment to the outcome. You might not stick with it past the window of time, or you might.
Don’t do it for the results, per se, but for the experience itself, for the positive benefits of having a hobby. You might find that you get the bug for something, and surprise yourself. Allowing the human side of you to flourish, to be curious, exploratory, and experimental, does wonders for feeling meaning and connection in life. One exploration will lead to another, don’t decide everything in advance, but rather let yourself try it and see.
Here are some things we think sound fun to try out if you never have:
bellydancing
improv
cooking or baking class
learning a language, practicing it with a native speaker
crafting, such as sewing, quilting, flower arranging
ceramics, watercolors, life drawing
woodworking
learning an instrument
making up songs
8. Spend Time in Nature
Nature is a healer. If we can get out into nature, we will get all the benefits of our brains getting entrained to the flow state, which helps us learn, grow, regulate, move past our trauma, and become creative and peaceful.
If nature is a little scary to you, start with short visits, start small. But get to know nature. Outer nature reflects the vastness, beauty, and remarkable qualities we have inside ourselves too. We are nature, we come from nature, nature made us and is happy to have us back.
9. Celebrate Yourself
You are a lovely being, you deserve affirmation, recognition, support, and kindness. And celebration is one of the human needs we all have. If we celebrate ourselves in positive, smaller, life-affirming, generous ways in our ordinary lives, we won’t feel so much need to “celebrate” in the old way.
If you feel like you don’t have too much to celebrate at the moment, setting some small goals for yourself and then achieving them will help (see number 10 below!).
If you set a goal of completing a gardening class, and you do complete the gardening class, and come home knowing how to compost, celebrate the eff out of that, my friend. Celebrate it like it’s a really big thing. It is a big thing.
If it’s too big a thing, start with something little. I want to try a new recipe. I will do it tonight. Wow, I did it, I tried the new recipe! I am trying new things! Yay! I did something loving and positive, look at me! I love my cookies!
Does this feel childish? Good. We’re all children on the inside. When we care lovingly for the child inside, then we, paradoxically, finally behave like responsible adults. Responsible adults with twinkly, smiling eyes.
10. Get Some Goals
If you’re not yet familiar with how goals can help you feel good about being alive, try it out this year. Setting and meeting specific, doable goals is a confidence-builder and a bringer of joy to your life. It can completely change your sense of yourself.
If you need to prove it to yourself, start with something little and very achievable, and build up. If you’ve already got some goals, review, refresh, and reset them this year.
Villa Kali Ma Can Assist You With Staying Sober This Year!
If you think you might like some help this year, help is here to be had. We at Villa Kali Ma are devoted to sobriety through and through, along with healing trauma and mental health struggles. Check out our offerings for inpatient and outpatient, and consider coming over to get to know us.