When people look for ways to heal from substance abuse, they often ask about exercise and addiction recovery. Exercise helps promote better physical health and a positive mental outlook. If you’re searching for exercise therapy in North Carolina for yourself or a loved one, here are four good reasons to start an exercise therapy program today.
Rebuild Self Confidence
Exercise and addiction recovery go hand-in-hand when it comes to rebuilding self-esteem. One of the things we lose to substance abuse is our self-confidence. Abuse can take the place of enriching activities and slowly eat away at the things we used to take pride in. When we start to build our identities around substance abuse, it can become a toxic feedback loop.
Exercise therapy gives us a new way to find identity and can restore self-confidence and create a positive feedback loop that leads to healing.
Exercise can go a long way to helping family and loved ones find the confidence they need to overcome substance abuse.
Physical Health Benefits
Substance abuse comes with many negative health effects. Combining exercise and addiction recovery helps to combat the damage abuse does to our bodies. When substance abuse starts to take over our lives, or the lives of our loved ones, we notice their physical health beginning to deteriorate. As abuse begins to take a more central role in their lives, they spend less time engaging in activities they used to find pleasurable. This means less time outdoors with friends and less time getting the exercise their bodies need.
This lack of exercise only makes the damage done to our bodies by substance abuse worse. Getting outside and getting physical can help to rebuild our bodies. Low-impact exercises, such as yoga and swimming, are great ways to complement other therapies. Part of recovering from addiction is regaining control over our health.
Exercise, when combined with other therapies, is a great way to begin to restore this loss of health.
Find Community
The communities we build while suffering from abuse can become unhealthy as we start to enter recovery. Exercise and addiction recovery gives us new activities and new ways to form community. Rather than old habits that helped foster abuse, exercise can build new friendships and habits that help in creating an abuse-free future. The best part about this is that everyone can find exercise they enjoy. Whether it’s jogging, training in the gym, or playing sports on a competitive or recreational level, there is a form of exercise that fits everyone’s lifestyle.
Leave Abuse Behind
Abuse can take control of our lives.
One of the reasons is that abuse can often take the place of activities that our loved ones once participated in. Exercise helps our loved ones combat this by giving them new activities to replace abuse. Rather than having their lives centered around their former abuse, it can now begin to grow around healthy activities, such as exercise. This is just one of the many reasons why exercise can be very beneficial to someone recovering from addiction.
Exercise can also increase the success rate of other therapies. We’ve already mentioned how exercise can help restore self-confidence and rebuild physical health. Other therapies for abuse, such as psychological treatments, medical treatments, and other forms of therapy, have a greater chance of succeeding when they are used in combination with exercise.
Foothills at Red Oak Recovery
You don’t have to let abuse control your life or the life of a loved one. Help is available, and the first step towards recovery is reaching out. If you or a loved one is currently suffering from abuse, reach out to our expert staff at Foothills at Red Oak Recovery today at 866.300.5275.
