How to Live Sober Happily

When you spend years trying to escape life through alcohol and start the journey to sobriety, you do it with optimism. You carry the belief that alcohol is the root of your problems and that if you eliminate alcohol, your life will be happy and healthy. However, many who have regained their sobriety will tell you that happiness is not guaranteed by being sober. But you can be happy living sober with some thought, planning, perseverance and hope.

Instructions

Happily Living Sober

• 1

  Discover the hurts, stresses and problems that caused you to escape through alcohol to begin with. Low self esteem, divorce, family illness or loss, business failures; they won't go away just because you quit drinking. Recognizing these triggers allow you to focus on finding real solutions to your problems instead of drowning them in booze.

• 2

  Appreciate your new alcohol free life and the strength that it took to get where you are. You have achieved something that a lot of people don't have the courage to try, let alone succeed at. Be proud of yourself and use that as part of your motivation to stay sober.

• 3

  Accept that, while you may have made mistakes, you deserve to experience the wonderful things in life just as much as the painful ones. You deserve to experience them with the full spectrum of emotions and senses that sobriety gives you, not through an alcohol fog.

• 4

  Avoid the negative people and situations of your alcoholic past and spend time cultivating positive ones. Look for people who inspire you, fill you with hope for yourself and the world, and who live a clean and sober life. Create a support network for your sobriety.

• 5

  Find a purpose, something that inspires you and fills you with a joyful determination. It may be something larger than yourself like community work, or it could be a commitment to something small and more personal like being a more responsive parent. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it means something to you that you believe in and is worth fighting for if things get rough.

• 6

  Create a spiritual relationship where you can find solace. Some develop a relationship with God; some pursue Eastern inspired routes to inner peace. The purpose is to create a place in your life where you are accepted for being exactly who you are, flaws and all, so that you can accept yourself.