According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 60% of individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) will enter sustained recovery. Yet, many are expected to relapse before entering sustained recovery. Relapse has been a common feature of the recovery process. While many risk factors can contribute to relapse, unaddressed addiction triggers are often a significant root cause. Understanding addiction triggers is vital to fostering the tools needed for maintaining recovery.
When left unchecked, addiction triggers can disrupt your well-being. At Driftwood Recovery, we know that fostering healthy attachments through connection is vital to maintaining recovery. Through your alumni program, you can find a community that offers compassion, understanding, and guidance to overcome the challenges of addiction triggers. Moreover, with alumni, you are not left alone to figure out how to live in recovery.
Yet, what does it mean to have addiction triggers? Understanding what addiction triggers are can provide insight into how to manage your triggers for sustained recovery.
What are Addiction Triggers?
According to the VA, triggers are typically defined as external events or circumstances that can lead to uncomfortable emotional or psychiatric symptoms. These emotional or psychiatric symptoms can manifest as anxiety, panic, discouragement, depression, or even negative self-talk. While experiencing or reacting to triggers is not unusual, they can be detrimental when left to fester. Often, triggers are associated with disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For example, in PTSD, triggers can be images of violence, a sound, or even a smell that triggers a previous traumatic experience.
Further, triggers are thought of as external stimuli that induce a reaction, but they can also be enacted internally. Beyond PTSD, triggers are also common in other mental health disorders and conditions like anxiety disorders and SUD. Although everyone experiences different triggers, understanding different types of trauma, like mental health triggers and addiction triggers, can provide insight into their impact on your well-being.
Understanding Mental Health Triggers
Mental health triggers and addiction triggers are often deeply intertwined with each other. Within mental health disorders alone, triggers can range from anxiety triggers to trauma or PTSD triggers. Mental health triggers can come from external or internal stimuli. Listed below are some of the ways mental health symptoms can be triggered externally or internally:
- External triggers
- Senses: sounds, sights, smells, and textures
- Arguing with a loved one or hearing people argue
- Seeing news coverage of an accident
- Smelling a loved one’s perfume after they have passed away
- Senses: sounds, sights, smells, and textures
- Internal triggers
- A memory, emotion, or sensation
- Loneliness
- Anxiety
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Anger
- Pain
- A memory, emotion, or sensation
Whether external or internal, mental health triggers can impede your psychological and physical well-being. Some of the ways mental health triggers can impact you include:
- Anxiety triggers
- Can bring up fear and worry that does not dissipate
- Negative memories
- You feel emotions like embarrassment, disappointment, or fear in similar situations
- Trauma
- You are reminded of a traumatic experience that brings up difficult-to-manage emotions
- Interpersonal conflict
- Interactions with people who remind you of past conflicts can trigger intense emotions
- Physical symptom triggers
- Lack of sleep or difficulty sleeping can trigger mental health symptoms like bipolar disorder (BP) symptoms
When left unaddressed, triggers can exasperate mental health symptoms and make it difficult to manage those symptoms. Thus, maintaining recovery can be further complicated by addiction triggers.
Impact of Addiction Triggers on Relapse
Addiction triggers, in particular, are associated with an emotional, environmental, or social situation that reminds you of your past substance use. Similar to mental health triggers, addiction triggers can be broken into external and internal triggers:
- External triggers
- Locations you associate with your past substance use
- Bars
- Clubs
- Certain neighborhoods
- Places or events where substances are readily available
- Specific dates
- Holidays
- Birthdays
- Anniversaries
- Loss of a loved one
- High-stress situations
- Work stress
- Unemployment
- Financial insecurity
- Housing instability
- Relationship conflicts
- Locations you associate with your past substance use
- Internal triggers
- Boredom and complacency
- Difficult emotions and mental health challenges
- Sadness
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Anger
- Physical discomfort or pain
When triggers are ignored or unknown, it can increase cravings and your risk for addiction and mental health relapse. Being aware of your addiction triggers is an important step toward building long-term tools to process and manage triggers rather than succumbing to relapse.
Learning to Manage Addiction Triggers
Addiction triggers are a common feature in recovery, but they do not have to equal relapse. With support, you can learn how to identify and manage your addiction triggers to thrive in recovery. Listed below are some of the ways you can identify and manage your addiction triggers:
- Physical symptoms
- Muscle tension
- Nervous feelings like butterflies in the stomach or a pounding heart
- Feeling sick to your stomach
- Psychological symptoms
- Remembering your past substance use, especially remembering it with fondness
- Planning to get substances or use substances
- Feeling a desire or need to use substances
- Engage in journaling to recognize triggers through self-reflection
- Keep track of your triggers
- Note what or who caused the trigger and when and where the trigger occurred
- Learn to identify high-risk situations that can be triggering
- Practice mindfulness and other self-care tools
- Meditation
- Grounding techniques
- Deep breathing
- Physical activity
- Lean on your support network of peers and loved ones to talk through and process triggers
Remembering healthy coping tools in a moment of distress can feel daunting. However, the support of a strong alumni program can provide access to resources and guidance to confront and overcome triggers in your daily life.
Healing With Social Support at Driftwood Recovery
At Driftwood Recovery, we know sustained recovery is made possible with the support of a strong and vibrant alumni program. With an active recovery community, you can find whole-person healing in the guidance, compassion, accountability, and encouragement those with shared experiences can offer. In our alumni program, you are reminded that recovery is not done alone but in tandem with a community that loves and uplifts you. Here at Driftwood Recovery, we provide a wealth of opportunities to connect with and heal with peers and your loved ones.
Unaddressed addiction triggers can contribute to mental health triggers and cravings that put you at risk for relapse. However, mental health and addiction-related triggers do not have to equal relapse. Greater awareness of triggers and how they impact your well-being can support lasting recovery. With support, you can deepen your understanding of yourself, properly identify your triggers, and build adaptive coping skills to manage triggers in your daily life. At Driftwood Recovery, we are committed to an attachment approach to healing and recovery with a vibrant alumni family to support a courageous life in recovery. Call us today at (512) 759-8330 to learn how your alumni community can support you.