As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes, healthy development is an important part of early childhood and adolescence. It is during the most formative years of your life that you discover, learn, and develop the characteristics and skills that help shape who you are. Learning how to talk, read, play, and share with others is invaluable to your development. Additionally, habit formation in your early life, like nutrition, sleep, hygiene, and physical activity, is also foundational to your well-being. Therefore, addressing the impact addiction has had on your habits is important for supporting the development of healthy habit formation in recovery.
At Driftwood Recovery, we know life is lived in the details. Thus, support does not start and end with abstinence. Sustained recovery is also about the little things; those everyday routines that help you build a new way of life. Forming healthy habits and building sustainable routines for your health and well-being does not happen overnight. Healthy habit formation requires daily practice and a commitment to active engagement with yourself and others.
Yet, you may question how to recognize unhealthy habits in your life. Thus, expanding your understanding of habit formation is vital to learning how to build healthy habits in recovery.
What Are Habits?
In general, habits are any type of behavior you repeat regularly with little or no thought. Moreover, habits are not innate but rather learned behaviors. Thus, a habit can be a part of any activity, like eating, sleeping, or even how you think. Yet, why do people form habits? According to Biological Psychiatry, habits have a critical purpose to make your behaviors more efficient and reduce decision burden. Your daily life is filled with countless decisions as simple as picking out a loaf of bread at the grocery store to as complex as navigating your health insurance plan.
Decision burden or fatigue eats away at your willpower, which can contribute to ineffective decision-making, procrastination, and avoidance. Thus, habit formation can help free up mental and emotional energy to address more demanding tasks. However, habit formation can be upsetting when it feels impossible to kick unhealthy or frustrating habits like drinking too much coffee or biting your nails. Therefore, understanding the psychology of habit formation is important to dismantling unhealthy habit formation.
Understanding Habit Formation
Habit formation typically starts as an external response before it gets internalized as an involuntary action. Behaviors are often divided into two systems: goal-directed behaviors and habit-based behaviors. One of the major differences between goal-directed and habit-based behaviors is their driving force. Goal-directed behaviors are driven by their consequences. With goal-directed behaviors, flexibility is necessary to process information about your external environment and how your actions impact it.
As a result, you make choices about your actions based on the consequences that could come from those actions. On the other hand, habit-based behaviors are driven by their situations with less flexibility. Yet, when is a behavior goal-directed, and when is a behavior habit-based? There are different models of understanding for the root of goal-directed and habit-based behaviors. Regardless of the model of development, habit formation is tied to the brain’s reward system, which is an important system for addiction.
Relationship Between Habits and Addiction
The Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience notes that understanding potential dysfunction for habit formation in the brain can uncover overly fixed behaviors in certain disorders. Disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and substance use disorder (SUD) have features of overly fixed behaviors. However, addiction indicates changes in brain activity across different brain regions due to SUD. The brain changes that accompany SUD can contribute to functional impairment and the failure of motivational, homeostatic, and impulse-control systems.
Further, the failure of motivational, homeostatic, and impulse-control systems are all potential routes to compulsive, unhealthy behavioral patterns. It is important to note that habit formation and addiction are not the same thing; rather, they share similarities and overlap with each other. For instance, habits and addiction use the reward system, but you typically have control over habits, while addiction is the loss of control. Habits can eventually cross over to addiction when you feel unable to control your use despite the consequences. Although habit formation does not equal addiction or relapse, unhealthy habits can be detrimental to your psychological well-being. Thus, poor mental health can contribute to a negative outlook and increase your risk of relapse.
Building Healthy Habit Formation in Recovery
You are not expected to be perfect, but replacing unhealthy habits with healthy ones is vital to healing in mind, body, and spirit. Listed below are some ways you can stop seeking comfort and an escape from unhealthy habits and build healthy habit formation:
- Start small
- Practice mindfulness
- Eat nutritious foods
- Build an eating schedule
- Hydrate
- Track your progress
- Engage in regular physical activity
- Go on walks
- Exercise classes
- Biking
- Gardening
- Sports
- Get plenty of sleep
- Build a sleep routine
- Limit caffeine and screen time
- Meditate
- Journal
- Read
- Nurture your interests
- Hobbies
- Volunteer
- Take classes
- Join a club
- Reach out for support
- Spend time with loved ones
- Sober activities and events
- Counseling
- Give yourself grace
With healthier habits, you can continue to develop tools for adaptive coping to thrive in recovery.
Alumni Support: Fostering Healthy Habit Formation at Driftwood Recovery
At Driftwood Recovery, we offer resources and services to help you maintain healthy lifestyle changes in recovery. Our dedication to an active and vibrant alumni program is built on our belief in the power of continuing care. Much like life itself, recovery has successes and setbacks that attempt to hinder your recovery. Therefore, you deserve a community of support, resources, accountability, and guidance to cheer you on at every stage. No matter where you are on your journey, our alumni services remind you that you are not alone and you can truly live a courageous life in recovery.
Understanding the process of habit formation is invaluable to dismantling unhealthy habits in recovery. Addiction typically includes habitable behaviors that contribute to impaired functioning and the failure of motivational and impulse control systems. Although addiction and habits share similarities and overlap with each other, habits can be controlled. Yet, not only can unhealthy habits become addictions, but they can harm your psychological health and increase your risk for relapse. Therefore, at Driftwood Recovery, we are dedicated to helping you build healthy habits like hobbies, quality sleep, and connections to thrive in recovery. With access to support, resources, and guidance, you can continue to build and maintain healthy lifestyle choices. Call us at (512) 759-8330 to learn about our alumni program.