Setting SMART Goals in Recovery: A Guide

How does someone know when they are in recovery from addiction? The SMART Recovery program helps them find out. This approach to sobriety gives patients extensive resources to help create goals with measurable results. Founded on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, a treatment protocol that works to change thinking patterns, SMART transforms vague hopes of sobriety into clear goals with steps to reach them. 

This program uses four points. Each point builds on the next. When patients reach the fourth point, they should experience lasting changes in their addiction behavior. These changes help them form a healthier, sober lifestyle. 

What Does SMART Recovery Stand For? 

SMART stands for “Self-Management and Recovery Training.” 

“Self-Management” has two components: 

1. The patient can progress through the steps at their own pace
2. The program guides the patient to answers rather than choosing solutions for them 

“Recovery” indicates the program’s goals: Addiction Recovery. 

“Training,” rather than “treatment,” refers to the program’s methodology. In some recovery programs, the patient passively receives treatment but has little to no active participation in their recovery. In SMART Recovery, the patient actively engages in their treatment, training themselves to find sobriety solutions that stick. 

These points aim to “enhance and maintain motivation to abstain” from drugs, alcohol, or psychological addictions. Patients who take the time to research these programs want to free themselves from addiction. SMART works to feed that motivation and transform it into a constant presence in the participant’s life.

SMART Recovery’s Four-Point Program 

The SMART program has four key points:

• Motivation building 
• Urge coping 
• Thought management 
• Life balance 

SMART, the nonprofit that created SMART Recovery, provides worksheets and additional literature on each of the four points. These resources break down the nebulous recovery process into a series of achievable tasks that build on one another. When completed, the patient has a clearer sense of their values, goals, struggles, and how they all interact. 

“Building and Maintaining Motivation” 

SMART Recovery asserts that motivation drives patients to reach their goals. Without motivation, no one can succeed at sobriety for long. 

SMART Recovery aims to cultivate that initial motivation and protect it against the insidious desires of addiction and dependence. The brain will always find ways to excuse or justify addictive behavior, and SMART Recovery gives patients the tools to overcome those vulnerabilities. 

Patients anchor themselves with tangible reminders of their morals and beliefs to stay focused on the bigger picture.

SMART has patients lay out their values and how their addiction affects their moral compass. Whether addicts mean to or not, their “uncontrollable cravings and compulsive drug seeking” behaviors will compromise their values. 

SMART Recovery forces patients to create tangible reminders of their morals and beliefs and uses external, physical reminders to help bring them back into the picture. With the desire to resist urges intact, patients can use that motivation to reinforce the second stage: coping mechanisms. 

“Coping With Urges” 

With their values firmly and explicitly laid out, SMART Recovery aims to give participants the “strong mental and emotional commitment to change these patterns” of behavior. 

It also notes that cravings are not physical withdrawal symptoms. In withdrawal, the body and brain have measurable chemical and physical responses to the lack of a drug or substance. Cravings exist solely in the mind, where they compromise values and make pleasure-seeking a priority. 

SMART Recovery has patients acknowledge that they must do more than try to fight their cravings off. Instead, patients acknowledge, monitor, analyze, and rethink their cravings.

Urge Log 

The urge log provides a template for patients to write down the events and scenarios that trigger cravings. This log is a diagnostic tool to identify people, places, situations, and events that lead to indulgences, urges, or relapse. It also provides a safe place to record the intensity and duration of these cravings. This information will formulate and inform the tools needed at later points. 

This log “becomes a road map” to help the patient analyze behavioral patterns. It creates an objective measure of variable behavior that patients may struggle to identify. Download a free urge log pdf here. 

Patients use this information to identify the everyday situations that trigger their urges and thus can proactively plan the best way to avoid them in the future. 

DEADS Coping Mechanisms 

While the urge log helps participants avoid situations that drive them to use, urges may appear regardless. The DEADS system offers patients an alternative in cases where cravings are unavoidable.

The duration of their urges has major importance for relapse prevention strategy as patients can plan different techniques for resisting urges to use long enough for the craving to pass.

Like SMART, DEADS is an acronym. It stands for the five coping mechanisms that SMART Recovery recommends. Each one uses the information gathered in the urge log to encourage patients to think about their urges objectively rather than emotionally. Then, it helps them formulate rational plans to overcome the urge or craving. 

Delay 

The urge log records the duration and intensity of cravings. With a start and stop time for each incident, patients know how long their urges last. Knowing the duration gives the patient a goal; they learn the amount of time needed for the craving to pass. 

The patient can also consider what steps to take to distract themselves while the timer runs. This type of plan allows the addict to act immediately rather than try to think of a solution.

Escape 

Patients also consider the actions to take to escape a trigger’s influence. For example, parties and social events that serve alcohol. Someone working toward alcohol sobriety can consider not attending a party. If they have an obligation to go or would still enjoy the social gathering, then DEADS can help formulate a plan to avoid drinking while there. For example, the person in recovery can plan and write down steps on how to leave the party before their desire to drink is triggered. 

That plan could include a quiet conversation with the host to help cover for their premature departure or taking advantage of other obligations, such as work the next morning and the need for an early bedtime. 

Avoid, Accept, or Attack 

The patient can avoid cravings. But if they can’t escape them, the addict can learn to accept the cravings’ presence rather than deny their existence. 

A patient who accepts their cravings’ existence can attack them head-on. Acknowledging their existence does not give these cravings power; instead, it gives the patient an enemy to avoid or verbally refute. They can talk themselves out of the situation (“don’t listen to him, he doesn’t want what’s best for you”) or encourage themselves to find a more constructive activity.  

Distract 

In preparation for distraction, the patient brainstorms activities they know from experience will help reduce or avoid cravings. “Addictive activities,” or time spent using or seeking drugs, pull time away from a busy day. In the distraction step, the brain associates time wasted on indulgence with other pleasurable activities, such as exercise, reading, or watching a movie. While patients should not replace one addiction with another, this step helps reclaim parts of their daily routine lost to addiction.

Substitute

When patients substitute addictive thoughts for healthier attitudes, they change their thinking. This step challenges patients to recognize the irrational thoughts accompanying urges and find new thought processes to replace them. 

Substitution also tackles feelings of disappointment and self-loathing that often emerge after a setback or relapse. Rather than ruminate over feelings of failure, it asks participants to find opportunities to replace these periods of depression with healthy activities.

DISARM 

The DISARM technique, like the DEADS coping mechanism, combats the urges and the rationalizations used to justify them. It stands for Destructive Images and Self-Talk Awareness and Refusal Method, and it encourages patients to turn their imagination into a weapon and use it to fight their addiction. 

In DISARM, patients name and personify their urges, turning them into enemies they can contradict and order to go away. After giving the order, the patient can visualize themselves driving that person away and forcing them to leave. 

This imagination exercise transforms a patient’s perception of their cravings from something abstract and undefeatable to a creature or person the patient can counteract, contradict, and take down.

“Managing Thoughts, Behaviors, and Feelings” 

The third step takes cues from cognitive behavioral therapy. This form of therapy combats negative thoughts and habits with questions that have objective answers. Then, it works to replace untrue answers to those questions with accurate and healthy ones. This process removes cognitive distortions about the self when reinforced over time. 

Like other points, the SMART Recovery program provides several tools to make progress and change possible. 

ABC Tools in SMART Recovery

The ABC tools stand for “Activating Event, Belief, Consequence.” Much like the urge log, it encourages patients to record an event that changed their feelings in the moment, the belief about themselves that led to the change (rational or not), and how the feelings changed their behavior. 

With hindsight, the patient can decide on “effective new thinking” that could have led to a better outcome. The addict will write the new belief down in their plan, remind themselves of it the next time the triggering event occurs, and try to use the belief to create more productive results. 

For example, they can replace “someone making [me] angry” with “they are simply behaving in a way that [I am]  getting angry about.” The patient’s perspective on the source of their anger changes. Since they now understand it exists solely in their mind, they can take control of it. 

The ABC Tools illustrate one of SMART Recovery’s other helpful thought management tools—changes in vocabulary. 

SMART Vocabulary Exchange 

This exercise allows patients to change how they process their negative feelings. Notably, it does not attempt to remove those emotions; it is intended to mitigate extremes and remove absolutes. The language people use changes how they think, so these changes in thinking give the patient positive ways to look at themselves. 

For example, the vocabulary exchange suggests patients change “I can’t” to “I choose not to.” The patient reframes their perceived inability to accomplish a task as a choice due to any number of factors.

There is nothing wrong with choosing not to do something. The reframing forces the patient to consider their choice as a decision rather than an inherent deficiency. It implies they can decide to try later, making them consider the possibility of success.

“Living a Balanced Life” 

The fourth and final step acknowledges that the sobriety journey lasts a lifetime. The skills developed in SMART Recovery give participants the tools they need to live a healthier, more balanced life after they finish the recovery stages. 

The tools in the fourth step include: 

• Exercises to determine how a balanced life looks based on the values identified earlier 
• Improved goal setting 
• Meditation and relaxation training 
• Vital Absorbing Creative Interest (VACI) is a way to find alternative activities and new ways to enjoy life 
• Self-acceptance that removes or reworks labels and thoughts about the self 

SMART also calls these stages “life skills,” not recovery skills. In theory, anyone can use these tools to improve their quality of life.

What Can SMART Recovery Treat? 

Unlike many other treatments, SMART Recovery can treat any addiction. It works well on psychological addictions like overeating, gambling, pornography addiction, compulsive spending, and “traditional” chemical dependencies like alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs.  

SMART Recovery has so much versatility because it targets thought processes and behavior. It goes beyond chemical dependencies and engages with mental and emotional blocks that may reduce the effectiveness of other addiction treatment programs.

SoberMind Recovery: Treating the Mind and Body

Though the mind matters, the body still needs care. In detox, the patient needs careful monitoring and expert treatment to ensure success in a dangerous situation. Our San Francisco recovery center combines many treatment modalities to make detox comfortable and long-term recovery feasible. 

We believe spreading the word about new and effective treatments that use therapeutic foundations like ours is essential. Follow our social media accounts for more informative articles about developments in addiction recovery. If you or a loved one are interested in learning more about detox or treatment, please reach out or browse our pages for more valuable information.