How to Cope With Stress When Recovering From Addiction

This question is probably one of the most common as well as complicated problems that we encounter with patients who are dealing with addictions. For the most part, a lot of our patients are using the substance that they have as a medication to cope with stress. So, what you have to do is uncouple that learned response to cope with medication whether that’s alcohol, methamphetamine, crack, or heroin – we have to teach them what we call planned alternative responses which are a cognitive behavior therapy concept where we teach people behavioral coping strategies that will uncouple the relationship between stress and immediate use “on-the-go” response to treat the stress.

Our Approach For Patients Dealing With Stress

Here at ATS, we use stress as one of the partial components of a definition of addiction. Indeed, we believe that addiction is a stress-induced impulse control disorder that leads to the use of a behavior or a substance in order to decrease the stress. What that means is if I feel stressful: I am going to engage in a behavior – whether that’s cutting, some type of self-mutilation, or even gambling to decrease the stress. It may also mean that if I am stressed, I am going to abuse medication to decrease the stress. So, you can see stress is inherent in not only the definition but as well as the solution to how you can help overcome some of the problems related to using substances to self-medicate.

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