The environment around you can have a greater impact on your sobriety than you may expect. Making your home and work environments conducive to your recovery can make maintaining your sobriety much easier. It’s also a simple and effective way of putting your recovery first.

Sober living at home or work is usually a brand-new experience for people who have achieved sobriety for the first time. Here are a few tips to help you make your environment match your recovery plan.

Remove Drugs or Alcohol From the Home

The first and most essential component of creating an environment conducive to sober living at home is to remove drugs or alcohol from the house. Having drugs or alcohol within easy reach can not only serve as a trigger for substance use cravings but also makes it easy for people to relapse if they experience challenges in their recovery.

Relapse is a process, and it doesn’t necessarily happen all at once. It may start with emotional withdrawal, a substance use craving, or even a mental plan for relapse. Yet, at each of these stages, you have the power to break the cycle and avoid returning to active substance use.

However, if drugs and alcohol are right there in the home, you severely reduce the amount of time you have to reconsider during these early stages of relapse. Removing drugs and alcohol from the home makes relapse inconvenient by requiring you to take more steps and put in effort in order for physical relapse to take place.

Recovery isn’t always easy, and many people are tempted to return to active addiction from time to time. But by keeping alcohol and drugs out of the home, you give yourself the best chances of long-term success.

Remove Potential Triggers

Triggers are the people, places, and things that remind you of substance use, spark cravings, and lead to disruptive mental health symptoms that are difficult to control. Everyone has a different set of triggers, but some common examples found around work or home include:

• Photographs of you while you were under the influence
• Drug paraphernalia such as pipes, aluminum foil, or lighters
• Anything that reminds you of your addiction

Even commonplace objects can be intensely triggering to certain people. If there’s something around your home or office that always triggers a drug craving, reminds you of substance use, or generally causes you discomfort, throw it out, hide it away, or donate it to someone else.

By removing these triggers, you can avoid these potentially harmful situations and keep moving forward on the path to recovery.

Consider a Home or Office Reset

[Pull quote: Scientists have discovered that an environment where people used to use drugs or alcohol can even trigger physical withdrawal symptoms due to the environment being connected so strongly to drug and alcohol use.]

Your home or office itself may have become a trigger for substance use. The environments where people use drugs or alcohol often become tied to the act of drug use itself on a deep neurological level. 

Scientists have discovered that an environment where people previously used drugs or alcohol can trigger physical withdrawal symptoms due to the environment being connected so strongly to past drug and alcohol use.

While you may not be able to change the location of your home or office, doing a “reset” may help alleviate these triggers and symptoms. A home or office reset may include:

• Changing the decor
• Rearranging the furniture
• Hanging new paintings
• Rethinking areas of your home or office

Essentially, this is a process of making the old new again and breaking the connection the environment has had to substance use.

While this may not solve the problem of triggers or environmental cues entirely, it can be a substantial improvement. Use this as an opportunity to rearrange your home or office to align with your new values and goals, and it can be a powerful force for sustaining your recovery.

Make Recovery Stand Out in Your Environment

A last important aspect of creating a sober living environment at home is to incorporate your recovery into the environment. This could mean leaving a daily meditation book on the coffee table, displaying items that are important to your recovery, or anything else that brings your commitment to sobriety to the forefront.

By placing these visual cues around your home or office, you remind yourself of how far you’ve come, what you’ve been able to achieve in your sobriety, and why you’ve worked so hard to achieve recovery. This helps you remain vigilant against potential relapse and always keep your recovery at the top of your mind.

Try Professional Sober Living With SoberMind Recovery

If your home environment is simply too triggering or you need a supportive place to live during early recovery, consider reaching out to SoberMind Recovery to learn about our options for sober living homes. SoberMind Recovery offers a number of different sober living options, including male or female homes and LGBTQ+ sober living options.

These facilities offer comfortable home-like environments with roommates who share your commitment to recovery. They have special rules to ensure all members of the household stay sober, are working on their personal recovery programs, and don’t bring triggering items into the home.

This is just one of the many services offered at our center for dual-diagnosis treatment in Los Angeles. When you’re ready to begin targeted and evidence-based treatment options to help you overcome your substance use problem, contact our team using the confidential form on our website.