Ignoring Stress Can Lead to Relapse in Recovering Addicts
Stress and a person’s inability to properly deal with it is one of the main reasons for those in recovery to relapse. A new study underscores the importance of learning how to cope with stress for people in early recovery.
H. Harrington Cleveland, associate professor of human development at Penn State, said that he and his colleague Kitty S. Harris, director of the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery at Texas Tech University, set out to predict the variations in a person’s drug cravings on a day-to-day basis. Cleveland said that because recovery must be maintained one day at a time, researchers also need to understand it on a daily level.
The researchers gave Palm Pilots to 55 college students who were in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, and asked them to record their daily cravings for alcohol and drugs, in addition to any stress or negative feelings they experienced. They were also asked to record their strategies for coping with stress.
The study, which appears in Addictive Behaviors, found that the ways in which the participants coped with stress—working through a problem or avoiding it—strongly predicts whether they would crave drugs when under stress.
Cleveland explained that avoiding problems or analyzing them not only makes a big difference on your life, but also plays an important role in recovery. Recovering addicts with better coping skills seem to have a better chance of staying clean and sober.
By analyzing the data, they found that the strength of the link between experiencing a stressful day and experiencing drug cravings doubles for addicts who avoid stressful problems rather than addressing them. Cleveland explained that avoiding stress seems to expose the individual to variations in drug cravings that could lead to relapse.
Source: Science Daily, Ignoring Stress Leads Recovering Addicts to More Cravings, June 23, 2010
