We have interviewed 17 people who have struggled with addiction. These stories are full of inspiring tips on how to live with and overcome addiction, both from substances and alcohol. Please allow these stories to be a beacon of hope for you, and know that there is always a way out.
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I’ve interviewed 17 people struggling with addiction, and here are the top 5 most mentioned tips that helped these people overcome
it:
In our many years of publishing helpful mental health content, we always received questions from our readers about specific situations. While we have a lot of helpful tips to share on how to be happier, we simply can’t offer advice for every situation.
That’s why I’ve set out to interview folks with every type of mental health struggle. My job as an interviewer is to categorize these interviews and present them in a way that is most helpful to our readers.
“Do you know how hard it is to be friends with a person who wants to kill themselves then 5 minutes later they’re ok? It’s draining. Well, I am that person. The struggle impacts me daily, however, last Saturday I had an epiphany that I’ve been working on and the days seem to be getting better.”
“I worked so much that my mental health and drinking spiraled out of control. I had no other coping mechanisms for stress. I have never developed healthy habits and didn’t think I had time to start because the business was experiencing explosive growth. I just wasn’t willing to stop and deal with it. Big mistake.”
Struggled with:
Addiction
Helped by:
Self-Care
Self-improvement
Volunteering
“Being a drug dealer and thinking I would be dead in a matter of months from my infectious diseases caused me to become really sloppy. This led to a S.W.A.T. raid on my apartment which led to me becoming homeless. Everyone around me thought it was only the drugs that impacted me.”
Struggled with:
Addiction
Depression
Hate
Homelessnesss
“At 16, I found my drug of choice, methamphetamine, which I began shooting up at 17. I had a few years of somewhat reduced drug use for the first years of college, then slid back due to a multi-assailant rape and abusive boyfriend. I lived in increasing misery until I was 32.”
“In those times, I became a master of disguise, adept at hiding the turmoil beneath a veneer of composure. To the outside world, I appeared to be navigating life with ease, but inside, there was a cacophony of emotions I kept tightly guarded. It was a delicate dance of maintaining appearances while wrestling with an internal chaos that threatened to spill over at any moment.”
Struggled with:
Addiction
Helped by:
Mindfulness
Self-awareness
Therapy
“The moment I felt something change for the better was when I was sitting at a bar sipping on a beer, and I called my father. I told him I truly didn’t want to drink anymore and really wanted to get sober. He sighed and said, “We tried to help you. Now it’s up to you just to stop drinking.” I asked him how that was going to be possible considering all of my options ran out. He screamed into the phone, “JUST STOP” and hung up.”
“At 22 years old, I knew that I was dying of alcoholism. I accepted that. The trauma symptoms I experienced were too overwhelming to stop drinking. When I was sober, I would sometimes experience 30 to 40 body memories of being sexually assaulted–again and again in succession. I drank to feel numb.”
“I felt prettier, smarter, funnier when alcohol entered my body so I simply continued numbing through the years. The progression of this disease of alcoholism turned into a nasty drug habit and those feelings of insecurity turned into deep darkness when I was “off my meds”. Or in other words, without alcohol or drugs.”
Struggled with:
Addiction
Depression
Suicidal
“As my anxiety levels grew, I turned to alcohol and then combined that with Vicodin to fend off the bad feelings. I would drink to the point of blacking out on a regular basis, sometimes never knowing how I got home.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Addiction
Childhood trauma
CPTSD
Helped by:
Reinventing yourself
Therapy
“I used alcohol to deal with stress, anxiety, boredom–essentially any negative feeling that I didn’t want to experience. I was also using it to try to generate positive feelings–to celebrate, to have fun, to socialize. Turning to alcohol for so many different reasons made it hard to control. I started by setting rules for myself, like only drinking on the weekends and only after a certain hour. But I consistently broke those rules, so they kept getting looser and looser.”
Struggled with:
Addiction
Anxiety
Depression
Helped by:
Exercise
Rehab
Self-improvement
Therapy
