Recovery is a learning process and if you are not learning anything in your recovery then it is likely that you are not making much personal growth either. Instead of just blindly crashing your way through recovery, it pays for you to actually measure what it is that you are doing.This is what I mean by doing “experiments” … really the secret is in simply raising your awareness, measuring what is working for you (and what is not), and also taking some simple suggestions.

The modern recovery landscape is dominated by the 12 step program. So, in early recovery you might be wise to “go with the flow” and accept whatever support you are given. That said, I would not suggest becoming dependent on those programs for decades at a time. So give meetings a chance, even if you are strongly turned off by them. Measure your success (or lack thereof). Use this information to plot a future course of growth.

This is one of the most important things that you can learn to do in your entire recovery journey. Taking suggestions from others increases your effectiveness and you free up your own mental cycles to be more mentally productive.Simply, find people you trust and ask them for advice. Take action, evaluate, learn, and grow. Rinse and repeat. Recovery is personal growth.

In fact, exercise basically became my meditation. The benefits that I get from regular jogging are exactly the same as the benefits of meditation. The only difference that I notice is that I am also getting an intense physical workout as well. Make a full one year commitment to exercise. I don’t think anyone would argue that this is a total waste of time. If you have the discipline to keep at it for a long time then eventually you will cross this point where the exercise becomes easy, light, fun–a true gift.

Most people are on auto-pilot in life. But recovery is about more than that. It is about personal growth. If you are not making personal growth, this leads to relapse in long term recovery. Raising your awareness, measuring your success in recovery and taking suggestions from other people are healthy tactic. It is like building a protective moat around your recovery. If you are not pushing yourself to make positive changes then you are not building any protection from relapse in the future.