By: Roberta G
It’s officially the holiday season! That means that with holiday breaks coming up you might be left with some downtime and we want to leave you with some activities to do to help you stay sober! Jumping right into our list of activities, let’s start with unplugging from social media! While we have this time over break to relax it might be worth it to try a little social media break. Often, especially as college students, social media becomes a crutch for us when we’re bored and it can often, not always, make us feel worse. It’s important that we take this time to truly connect with ourselves and our loved ones!
Speaking of connecting with loved ones, this could be a great opportunity to hang out with some old friends! Try having an alcohol/drug-free meet up and just have fun! It’s important to remember that we don’t need alcohol or drugs to have fun and it’s essential to remind ourselves that we can truly connect with others sober! Hanging out with friends is important and it’s good to maintain a good circle of people that support you and love you! With these friends maybe go for coffee, have a movie night, or just get dinner together and talk! It’s important to remember you are not alone!
Because of all of this free time, this could be a great opportunity to take up a new hobby! We don’t recommend that with all this free time we just sit around with nothing to do, so maybe try a new sport, maybe a new instrument to try, or just any new hobby that will help you stay entertained and sober! One activity that you could try is to read more! Below we will provide a list of books about addiction and recovery that we think would be worth your reading!
- Rewired: A Bold New Approach To Addiction and Recovery “by Erica Spiegelman Considered to be one of the best addiction recovery books in recent history, author Erica Spiegelman lays out a path to recovery that is empowering and easy to follow. As the title infers, Rewired is about thinking differently about living clean and embracing recovery. The book presents healthy recovery as the result of living in accordance to twelve time-honored powerful principles, including honesty, evolution, solitude, love, compassion, and hope. Erica Spiegelman is a well-respected addiction counselor, author, and speaker who has had her own struggles with alcoholism and addiction. She promotes a holistic approach to healthy recovery that goes well beyond abstaining from drugs and alcohol.”
- Scar Tissue “by Anthony Kiedis & Larry Sloman
Of books about heroin use, none is rawer than this bravely told memoir about the life of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis. Published in 2004, Scar Tissue holds immense value for as a cautionary tale for anyone prone to glamourizing drug use, especially heroin use. The book does a terrific job at taking the reader through the depths of sadness and despair that accompany heroin addiction. With the book, the reader sees not only how much one can lose to drugs – such as Anthony Kiedis’s loss of a best friend and bandmate Hillel Slovak to overdose – but also how intense the hold of addiction can remain after the loss of a loved one.” - The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are “ by Brene Brown According to Futures Case Manager Katie Dalo, this is a book every person on the planet should read a minimum of 10 times. As Katie describes the book, “it’s about radical acceptance, that you are perfectly imperfect and it’s o-freakin-k!” Researcher Brene Brown has become immensely popular over the past handful of years, due in large part to her excellent TED Talks about vulnerability and shame. The Gifts of Imperfection is about evaluating ourselves and seeing that we are bombarded with “messages from society and the media telling us who, what, and how we should be.” These messages help to inform how we perceive ourselves, and feed the feelings of inadequacy that live beneath the surface for a great number of people who struggle with substance use disorder.”