What Living in Recovery Actually Looks Like

Hey everybody, welcome to the Addiction Unlimited podcast where you get to learn everything you want to know about addiction and recovery. I'm your host, Angela Pugh, co-founder of Kansas City Recovery, Life Coach and Recovery and Alcoholic. To learn more about me, you can listen to episode zero on your podcast app or find us on the web at AddictionUnlimited.com. Hello my friend, welcome back to Addiction Unlimited. I'm your coach, Angela Pugh. You know we talk all the time on this show about the difference between sobriety and recovery. sobriety is quitting, recovery is healing. sobriety removes the alcohol. Recovery heals the patterns underneath the behavior, the ones that made you reach for alcohol in the first place. I say that a lot and I believe it completely, but here's what I don't say enough. What does that actually look like on a Tuesday hour by hour? Because it's one thing to understand the concept, it's another thing entirely to live it. And I think a lot of people, even people who have been sober for a while are living in that gap. They get it intellectually, they know recovery is supposed to be more than just not drinking, but the day still feels like you're mostly just getting through it. Today we're closing that gap. We're going to walk through a full recovery focused day from morning to night and I'm going to show you exactly what living in recovery actually looks like, not in theory, but in practice, the actual moments that make up your actual day. And before we walk through the day, I want to make sure we are grounded in the distinction that makes all of this matter. Quitting drinking is the starting line, not the finish line. I know you've heard me say that, but stay with me because I want to get more specific about what that means. When you quit drinking, you stop the bleeding, right? And that matters enormously, but drinking was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem was all the things you were using it to numb, escape and relieve. The fear of judgment, the loneliness, the trauma, the patterns, right? People pleasing, avoidance, emotional reactivity, self-sabotage. All of that is still there when the alcohol is gone. So getting sober gives you a clearer head, but it doesn't automatically make you patient, emotionally stable, honest or capable of handling your life differently. You can be completely sober and still be living a drinking life. The same choices, the same relationships, the same way of responding to discomfort. You're doing it all just without alcohol. That's sobriety without recovery. And it's exhausting, it's white knuckling, it's presence without participation. Recovery is different. Recovery is when you start healing the patterns. When you stop just removing the substance and start rebuilding the whole ecosystem around it. The way you start your mornings, the way you show up for the people in your life, the way you respond when something triggers you, the way you fill your days with something that actually means something. That's what today is about. It's not about having a perfect day, it's about having an intentional one. But before we walk through the day, I want to give you the framework underneath all of it, because when you understand this, everything else clicks. There are three things addiction needs to thrive. Three conditions it depends on to keep its grip on you. It needs you to feel alone. It needs you to be isolated and it needs you to feel bad about yourself. That's it. Those are the three conditions it's always working to maintain. And recovery, real recovery, living in recovery is the daily practice of breaking down those conditions and making sure you're not living in those circumstances on purpose every single day. You're building connections so you're not alone. You're staying close to other people in recovery so you're not isolated and vulnerable. And you're building habits that feel good, not just because they feel good, but because they're healthy and they're slowly rebuilding the way you feel about yourself. Every single thing we're going to talk about today maps back to one of those three. That's the whole plan. Now I do want to pause on isolation for a second because I think this is the one people most often get wrong. We are masters of emotional isolation. And I say we because this isn't just an addiction thing. This is a human thing that addiction takes to a whole other level. And here's what I mean. A lot of people hear isolation and think, oh, that's not me. I'm not sitting alone at home in a dark room. I'm out with my golf buddies. I'm going to church. I go to the gym. I do book club. I met school pickup line with all the other parents. I'm not isolated. And I'm going to push back on that because isolation isn't just about whether people are around you. It's about whether anyone actually knows what's going on inside you. You can be in a room full of people and be totally alone. If you're not telling anyone what you're actually feeling, what you're struggling with, what's keeping you up at night, what happened this week that rattled you, then you are emotionally isolated, full calendar and all. And emotionally isolated is equally vulnerable. The hall doesn't give a fuck that you have a full social calendar. It's a predator. And it looks for the same opening every single time, the place where you're alone with it, where nobody knows what's really going on, where you haven't set out loud to another human being, I'm having a hard time right now. That's the opening. That's what we're closing off. Not just by showing up to things, but by actually letting people in when we get there. If you want to really understand the two layers of connection you want in need, go back and listen to episode 421 after this one. It's called overwhelmed by sobriety advice. Here's how to actually start. And it breaks down the two layers of people you need to thrive in recovery. This is foundational, not optional. Okay, now let's start the day. Morning. This is self-care in your nervous system. Here's something I want you to really understand about a recovery-focused morning because I think most people have it backwards. The morning routine isn't about productivity, right? It's not about optimizing your day or getting ahead of your to-do list. It's about regulating your nervous system before the world gets to it. Think about what we're doing when we were drinking. We were regulating. Every time we reached for a drink, we were managing anxiety, numbing discomfort, trying to feel something or stop feeling something. The substance was doing a job. Now that it's gone, that job still needs to get done. Your nervous system still needs regulation. It just has to learn new tools. This is what a morning routine in recovery is actually for. So what does that look like in practice? First, don't reach for your phone within the first 10 minutes of waking up. I know, I know, and I'm not great about this either. But here's why this matters. When you grab your phone, first thing, you immediately hand your attention to everyone else's agenda. Your nervous system goes from resting to reactive before you've even had a chance to orient to the day. You're already behind before you've even started. Second, give your body a signal that today is safe. This doesn't have to be elaborate, right? Five slow deep breaths. Put your feet on the floor and just feel your feet grounded on the floor. Two minutes outside. You're not trying to have a spiritual experience. You're telling your nervous system, we're okay. We're here and we're safe. In third, anchor to something intentional. A reading. A few lines in your journal asking yourself one question before the day starts. Like, what do I want today to be about? Not a to-do list, but a direction of value, something you're pointing toward. This is self-care. Not as a luxury or a trend, but as a daily practice of showing up to yourself before the world demands anything from you. The goal isn't a perfect model. routine, the goal is a grounded one, because how you enter the day determines how you move through it. And here's what I want you to understand about why this matters so much, especially in early recovery. 99% of recovery, particularly in the beginning, is nervous system regulation. That's what connection does. That's what sharing yourself honestly with another person does. That's what building small daily habits does. The ones that start to counteract the negative feelings about yourself and slowly, slowly build new positive ones in their place. This is what gives you the strength to keep going. Not motivation, not willpower, but regulation, stability, the feeling, even just a flicker of it, that you're okay in your building something. Each day that you build on those foundational pieces, you are literally changing your unhealthy habits, your rituals, your reactions, your thought processes. You're breaking down the old to make room for the new. And it happens in pieces so small that you don't even notice it. Until one day you look back and you're like, "Holy shit, I can't believe how far I've come." And I want to share something personal here because it illustrates exactly what this looks like in practice. When I got sober, I had debilitating anxiety, just like everyone else, like all of you. Everybody says this to me, "Oh, Angela, but my anxiety." Well, welcome to the club, pal. Every single one of us has it. You're not unique. You're just one of us. And I knew, I knew that if I didn't figure out how to work with it, it was going to stop me from going to meetings, from connecting with people, from doing all the things I needed to do to actually recovery. My anxiety would have been very happy to keep me isolated and alone and feeling terrible about myself, which, if you've been paying attention, is exactly what addiction needs. So I created a little assignment for myself, a tiny one. And the first part of the assignment was every single day I had to make eye contact with someone. It might have been eye contact and smile, but eye contact was the big thing. And that was it. Just eye contact, not a conversation, not an introduction, just look at another human being in the eye for two seconds, right? And I know that sounds silly, but my anxiety can easily derail my whole life if I give it the tiniest opening. So making a conscious effort to look up instead of looking at the floor and make eye contact was a huge step for me. And as that got easier, as my nervous system started to learn that eye contact wasn't going to kill me, I raised the bar. The next step was eye contact in one word. Hi, hey, that's it. And as that got easier, I added a small phrase, how are you? Good to see you. Glad you're here. And every single time I pushed myself to do a little more, to be a little braver, to try a little harder, I knew I was breaking my anxiety, piece by piece, slowly but surely, I was dismantling the thing that was trying to keep me small and isolated and stuck. And listen, this whole process, this whole thing took less than two weeks, for me to get pretty comfortable and for the majority of that anxiety about walking into a meeting to fall away literally 10 or 12 days. So if you think about that, we're talking three to four days for each of those parts. That's it. This isn't crazy. We build these things up in our heads like they're insurmountable and it's going to take so long. But the truth is, when you get your shit together and decide to do something and make an intentional effort to do it, there's nothing you can't do. And you'll be blown away by how fast you can change. That's what we're doing in recovery every single day, breaking down the old pieces to make room for the new ones. And it starts in the morning with the smallest, most unglamorous act of showing up to yourself and giving your nervous system something solid to stand on before the day begins. Hey, real quick, I want to talk about something that actually fits perfectly with what we've been talking about today. And that's taking care of yourself. One of the things I invested in when I got sober was my sleep because your nervous system is working over time. So the way you wind down at night really matters. And one of the best gifts I've given myself is cozy earth. I have their bamboo pajama set and honestly getting ready for bed at night feels like a reward. It's lightweight. It sleeps cool. And it's the kind of soft you have to feel to believe. And after a long day of doing the work, showing up, staying connected, being intentional, you deserve to actually rest. Cozy earth also has their classic cuddle blanket. You've heard me talk about this thing. It is exactly what it sounds like. Plush, warm, the kind of thing you wrap around yourself and you immediately feel better, which in recovery is not a small thing. They also have a hundred night sleep trial. So if you don't love it, send it back. You won't, but you can. And everything is backed by a 10 year warranty because this is the kind of quality that actually lasts. Go to cozy earth.com, use my code Angela for up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, let them know you heard about it here. Okay, let's get back to the episode. Okay, now we're in kind of mid-morning. I want to talk about active participation. I did a whole episode on this episode for 18 because I think it might be one of the most misunderstood things in recovery. Presence is not equal to participation. Showing up is not the same as doing the work. And I see this everywhere. People who are consuming massive amounts of recovery content, podcast books, challenges, meetings, and they're still stuck. Still struggling with the same things they were struggling with when they first got sober. Why? Because they're present for other people's recovery. They're not actually participating in their own. Passive sobriety creates an illusion of action, right? And the brain loves this, by the way. It gets all the good feelings of progress without any of the discomfort of actual change. You read the book, you underline the good parts, you think, yes, that's exactly what I needed to hear today. And then you close the book and nothing changes because reading about what someone else did is not the same as doing those things yourself. So what does active participation look like in the mid-morning of a recovery day? It might look like a therapy session where you actually bring the thing you've been avoiding instead of starting with surface level updates. It might look like calling your sponsor with a specific question instead of just checking in. It might look like showing up to a meeting on time, making eye contact, sharing, and introducing yourself to someone you don't know yet. It might look like following through on the thing, the last episode, or the last session, or the last conversation told you to actually try, not just thinking about it, but actually doing it. Participation can be uncomfortable. That's how you know you're doing it right. You can't think your way into better actions, but you can act your way into better thinking. And that's exactly what active participation in recovery asked you. Now let's move into what we'll call afternoon personal responsibility in your triggers, right? If the morning is about grounding and the mid-morning is about engagement, the afternoon is usually where the day gets real, right? This is when that email comes in that you weren't expecting when the conversation goes sideways when someone says the thing or does the thing, and suddenly you're reactive and you're not entirely sure why when the craving shows up out of nowhere at 2 p.m. on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday. This is where personal responsibility either shows up or it doesn't, right? And I want to be clear about what personal responsibility is and what it isn't because people confuse it with self-blame all the time. Self-blame is about fault. It's a spiral. It's the, I'm such an idiot. I always do this. What's wrong with me? It keeps you stuck in shame, which is one of the most dangerous places to be in recovery. Personal responsibility is about ownership. It's not self-blame, it's self-agency. There's a massive difference. Owning your triggers means you stop outside forcing the explanation for your inner life. Instead of she made me so angry, which puts all your power in someone else's hands, it becomes, wow, I got really triggered when she said that, and I got to figure that shit out. That shift is not small. That shift is everything. Because when you own your triggers, you have options. You can pause before you react. You can bring it to your therapist. You can journal about it. You can call someone. You can ask yourself like, what's actually happening here? What old wound is this poking? What pattern is showing up right now? A recovery focused afternoon isn't about having zero friction. Life is going to life. It's going to keep throwing you curveballs and unexpected hardships and difficult people. That's not going to stop. What changes in recovery is what you do with it. Personal responsibility is the practice of saying, I'm not a passive character in my own story. I have agency, even in hard moments, especially in hard moments. And I want to add something here that I think is going to reframe something you've probably been beating yourself up about for a long time. Avoidance and procrastination are two things that show up in a huge way for most of us. And avoidance and procrastination are not character flaws. They are emotion regulation techniques. Sit with that for a second. Because I know so many of you have been running a list of things you haven't done yet. Going to meetings, quitting drinking, calling the therapist, hiring a coach, cleaning out that room, making that phone call, starting that thing, you keep saying you're going to start. And every day that you don't do it, you add another layer of shame on top of it. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I so lazy? Why can't I just do the damn thing? But here's what's actually happening. When something feels scary or overwhelming or intimidating or even like it's just going to take too long or like it might not go well, your emotions escalate, your nervous system spikes and you shut down. Not because you're lazy, not because you're undisciplined, not because something is fundamentally wrong with you as a human being. But because your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, it's protecting you from a perceived threat. And this gets especially acute when we stop drinking. Because for years, the substance was the escape hatch. Feeling overwhelmed drink, scared drink, feeling like the task is too big and you might fail and everyone will see it drink. When that's gone and you don't have new tools yet, avoidance becomes the next best option the nervous system can find. So personal responsibility doesn't mean forcing yourself to power through everything on sheer willpower. It means getting curious instead of critical. Instead of why haven't I done this yet? What emotion is making this feel impossible right now? What does my nervous system need before I can actually take this step? Sometimes the answer is I need to make it smaller. I need to break it down into a piece so small that my nervous system doesn't perceive it as a threat. Like the eye contact before the conversation right? One sentence before the whole hard talk. One small action before the whole overwhelming project. You're not broken, you're dysregulated and dysregulation has a solution. Now let's talk about closing the day, the wind down. How you close a day matters just as much as how you open it. A recovery focused evening isn't about collapsing in front of the TV until you fall asleep. It's about creating a genuine transition. Something that tells your nervous system we're done doing for today and we're shifting into rest. That might look like a quick inventory, right? Not a shame spiral, just accounting for your day. Like what went well today? Where did I show up the way I wanted to? Where did I fall short? And what do I want to do differently tomorrow? This is self-reflection, not self-punishment, right? Recovery asks you to look honestly at your day without making it mean something catastrophic about who you are. It might look like putting your phone in another room, going for a walk, a shower, doing some reading, whatever it is, build it into a ritual instead of an afterthought. And then sleep, right? Full actual sleep, which is its own form of radical self-care, right? Especially in early recovery. When your brain is literally doing the biological work of rebuilding, your day doesn't have to end perfectly. It just needs to end intentionally. Okay, so that's a day, not a perfect one, a real one. sobriety is quitting, recovery is healing, and healing looks like this. It looks like a morning where you show up to yourself before the world gets to you. A mid-morning where you actually participate instead of just casually showing up. And afternoon where you own what's yours instead of outsourcing it and a night where you close with honesty and rest. You're not going to nail every single piece of this every single day. That's not the point. The point is that you're building something. You're not just removing a substance, you're replacing the whole ecosystem around it. And that takes time and practice and showing up even when it's uncomfortable. And remember the three things addiction needs to thrive. Recovery is the daily practice of taking all three of those things away from it. You build connections, so you're not alone. You stay close to other people in recovery and you actually let them in, not just stand next to them, right? So you're not isolated and vulnerable. And you build habits that are healthy, that are yours, that slowly and genuinely rebuild the way you feel about yourself. And before I let you go, if today's episode hit home for you, if you're in that gap between sobriety and recovery and you're ready to close it, I want to tell you about something I just opened up. And first of all, I want you to know I hear you. After hearing so many of you telling me that you want support, but you aren't ready for the full six week commitment and price tag of private coaching with me, I created something new. It's called the Recovery Accelerator. It's a four week group coaching program, designed to do exactly what we talked about today. Build your sober foundation, not just stop drinking, but actually start recovering, right? Here's what you get. You get full access to my Recovery Starter Kit course, right? With video lessons, work sheets, step-by-step guidance, so you know exactly what to do. And then you get group coaching sessions with me to help you actually do it in your real life, to work through the hard parts and follow through. Plus, you get 30 days inside my private member community and we have multiple meetings every week for connection and support while you're doing the work. The course tells you what to do. The coaching helps you figure out how to do it in your life. The accelerator gives you the best of both worlds, right? That's the combination that actually moves the needle. It's at addictionalimited.com/accelerator. Also, it's the most affordable way to work with me professionally. It's something brand new I'm trying out, spots are limited. So if you're ready to stop starting over again or just feeling like you're just getting through the day and you're ready to build your real foundation and recovery go check it out. Addictionalimited.com/accelerator. I will put that link in the show notes. If you want to talk to me about some more serious coaching to really stop screwing around and get this together, book a call with me, right? Addictionalimited.com/call. Those links are in the show notes. I will link the podcasts I talked about in the show notes also. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will see you next week. You've reached the end of another great episode of the Addiction Unlimited Podcast, Candid and Honest Conversation about Addiction and Recovery. Be sure to visit us at addictiononlimited.com to join the conversation and access show notes and links to everything we talked about. Love this episode? Please take 30 seconds to subscribe, rate, and review on iTunes to help us improve and give you the information you want. Thanks for listening. See you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]