10 Daily Habits to Strengthen Sobriety and Build a Healthier Life

Building healthy habits and planning productive daily routines are the cornerstones of recovery from addiction. When you plan your day and fill your time with activities and behaviors that benefit your body, mind, and soul, you’ll find it easier to fully commit every essence of your being to staying sober.

Let’s look at the 10 most critical habits you can practice in a sober living program, and when we say “practice,” that’s all there is to it. Repeating these activities and behaviors every day for 90 days makes them habits, and they feel effortless to practice. There are more, but if you can pull off instilling these 10, you’re well on your way to making a lasting recovery and never using drugs or alcohol again.

Habit #1: Build a Regular Sleep Cycle

Getting enough sleep is probably the most fundamental, most foundational habit you can build to ensure you stay on track to achieving your recovery goals. When you sleep, your brain rewires its neural pathways. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine peaks during REM sleep, setting the information you gather when you’re awake into your memory.

Think about that and what it means for your recovery. It means that the hours you stay sober when you’re awake and every victory you get from overcoming a trigger get hardwired into your brain as you sleep. It’s literally sleep that’s responsible for removing the chains of addiction wrapped around your mind during the recovery process, one night at a time.

Healthy sleep habits are easy to build. Just set a bedtime and stick with it every night. Make sure there are eight hours between when you fall asleep and when you wake up. If you have bad sleep latency (the time it takes you to fall asleep), add the average latency to your total sleep time. If you want to kick it up a notch, use a biometric tracking device like a smartwatch or smart ring to monitor your sleep. It’s the best tool to keep you accountable for the time you spend between the sheets each night.

Habit #2: Develop an Attitude of Gratitude

Start your daily routine by being thankful for what you have in your life. When you open your eyes in the morning, give your mind a moment to settle and then start going over a list of things you’re grateful for in your life. If you struggle to think of anything, don’t worry; that’s pretty common for first-timers. It’s so easy to get going, though.

“I’m grateful I woke up this morning.”

“I’m grateful yesterday was a sober day, and I’m grateful for the chance to do it again today.”

“I’m grateful for my friends and family and a chance to turn around my life.”

You get it. Those are just examples. You can even start by saying you’re grateful for being able to breathe air into your lungs. As you list one, another will pop into your mind, and the exercise becomes effortless.

Just watch how doing this for three days in a row will totally change your mindset and emotional state. When we realize what we’re grateful for, it creates a powerful connection between our mind and the universal energy around us and we vibrate at a frequency that brings us opportunity, happiness, and prosperity. It might sound crazy, we get it. But just give it a try, and we promise it will make a big difference after just a few days.

Habit #3: Reaffirm Your Commitment to Sobriety Daily

When you’re done listing what you’re grateful for, take another minute to reaffirm your commitment to staying sober. Affirmations are incredibly powerful and one of the keystones of reprogramming your mind. What you say doesn’t even need to be true. If you repeat it enough your subconscious will eventually assume it’s true and match your behavior, thoughts, and actions into manifesting it.

You’re not even consciously aware that these changes are unfolding in your mind when you use this strategy. But you will notice subtle changes in your behavior patterns that benefit your life and push you along the path to staying sober.

Repeat this mantra.

“I am sober.”

“I will stay sober.”

“I want to be sober.”

Don’t use negatives in your affirmations. “I will ‘never’ use drugs.”

Your subconscious doesn’t recognize the negative in the affirmation, so you’re literally saying, “I use drugs,” and like we said, the mind manifests your affirmations.

Habit #4: Create a Consistent Morning Routine

Organizing your morning and planning your day is so important in addiction recovery. Being disorganized is one of the big relapse warning signs you need to watch for. So, building a productive, effective morning routine is another habit you need to get into doing every day.

Wake up at the same time in the morning. Take care of yourself and create a personal hygiene routine that makes you feel clean and confident. Eat in the morning or fast if that’s part of your diet plan. Sit down and plan your day in 1-hour time blocks. Fill every time block with productive activities that benefit your recovery and add value to your quality of life.

Habit #5: Eat Properly and Drink Enough Water

When you’re staying with us at Carrara, the wellness team takes the hassle of planning your diet off your hands. If you don’t have time to cook when you leave our inpatient program and there’s no one who can do it for you, subscribe to a meal service like Factor Meals or Hello Fresh. These companies deliver you ready-made meals that fit your macros, just toss them in the microwave and they’re ready to eat in a few minutes.

If you go out to a restaurant to eat, order something healthy off the menu. The team at Carrara teaches you everything you need to know about your food. You’ll understand how many calories you need to eat a day and what that looks like when translated into your meal planning and the food you eat.

Eating well and drinking enough water during the day are critical cornerstones of health and the healthy daily habits you’ll need to master to stay on track with staying sober.

Habit #6: Get Your Daily Dose of Exercise

Bringing positive habits into your daily experience brings positive changes into your life. You already understand the value of exercise in your daily routine after spending time with your personal trainer and our holistic healing team at Carrara.

Carrying on with your exercise program is critical to reduce stress and anxiety and keeping your body physically healthy. Keep your program going. Practice your morning yoga and commit to going to the gym or for a run every day these positive routines reduce stress by keeping you physically fit and healthy.

Habit #7: Empower Yourself By staying Present

Your past doesn’t define you. Whatever happened to you, whatever you went through, whatever you used to think about you, that’s in the past. Right now, in this present moment, you have the power to change. Think about it, life is just a series of moments woven together across time, and it’s only in the present moment that we have the power to act.

Habit #8: Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is one of the most powerful tools for proactively managing your recovery in the present moment. When you’re self-aware of how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking, you can control your actions and that’s a powerful tool in recovery.

Our thoughts create our actions and being mindful of your current state allows you to step outside yourself and externally analyze your thoughts and feelings from an objective standpoint.

Entering a mindful state is one of the ways to bring yourself back to a level headspace when you encounter a trigger, and it makes you uncertain about your ability to stay sober.

Habit #9: Replace Triggers with Healthy Activities

Your past destructive habits are connected to your emotions, behaviors, and environment. You’ll need to stay away from the situations, places, and people that trigger you addiction and put you at risk of relapsing. Find hobbies that benefit your life and add value to your health and experience. We only get so much time in life, and we’re capable of great things.

If you used to go out into the city and party on the weekends, do something you enjoy that’s physically exerting that you enjoy on Saturday morning. Take a swim at the fitness center or in the ocean. Go for a run on the beach or sign up for a sports team.

These activities are totally different from the trigger activities you used to do. You’ll want to go to bed early on Friday night to feel fresh on Saturday morning. On Saturday night, you’ll feel so drained, but in a good way, and you’ll want to get to sleep early. The thought of hitting the bars or clubs will never even cross your mind.

Habit #10: Develop a Nighttime Routine for Reflection

Sleep hygiene is probably the second biggest part of your daily routine after getting enough sleep. What you do in the last hour before you go to bed decreases the “sleep latency” we talked about earlier. It also determines the quality of sleep you get, including the amount of healing deep sleep and REM sleep you get during the night.

Run a hot bath; it raises your body temperature slightly, and when your body cools down, it rapidly induces sleep. Fill the bath with essential oils and Epsom salts. The magnesium and antioxidants penetrate your skin cells and enter your bloodstream. These wonderful additions to your bath water calm your sympathetic nervous system, reducing stress and anxiety. They ramp up parasympathetic nervous system activity, helping your brain waves change to the delta and theta states.

Cool your room to between 60.8°F and 64.4°F for the best climate to optimize sleep. Before you close your eyes, if you feel up to it, practice the gratitude exercise we talked about earlier. This time, try and journal it. Write down what you’re grateful for that day, and then write out your goals immediately after that. When you’re finished with the exercise, take a breath and a moment to reflect on what you wrote as you close your journal and your eyes, and drift off to sleep.