If your car is careening out of control, there are driving techniques that can help you avoid an accident. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the crash from happening in the first place?
A good way to protect against automobile accidents is to ensure your vehicle is inspected, repaired, and maintained ahead of time. A car that’s in good shape has less that can go wrong on the road.
Sometimes life spins out of control as well. And if addiction is in the picture, a loss of control has much higher odds of happening. But if you maintain the vehicle—manage your wellness and well-being—ahead of time, you can avoid the skid altogether and prevent addiction from happening.
Prevent Addiction by Maintaining the Right Behaviors
The vehicle you navigate through life—yourself—has components that are spiritual, emotional, social, mental, and personal in nature. Without proper maintenance, those systems can stop functioning the way they should.
Your life can get into bad shape in a number of ways:
- You may become more and more self-absorbed and lose your focus on God and others.
- There can be a descent into depression or anxiety, or an increase in your anger or control.
- If you lose self-awareness, you will repeat mistakes, and your wrong doings can multiply.
Regular self-inspection can increase your awareness to help you deal with these issues early before they turn into problems.
As preventative maintenance, you can learn and practice healthy lifestyle behaviors. This will help you develop the resilience to withstand the trials and issues we all face. The good news is there are such behaviors that are part of the most successful life improvement program in history—the Twelve Steps—that inspired the book STEPS: A Daily Journey to a Better Life.
This is the third and last article in this series on how to prevent addiction. A great place to continue that process of self-care and personal transformation is with the easy-to-understand and flexible lifestyle guidelines found in the STEPS. If you learn and apply the principles in that book, you will be embarking on a daily journey to a better life, and you will love the results!
You can maintain your well-being by learning those life improvement steps. They are tools to help you re-learn how to live in a way that immunizes you against negative effects of self-destructive behaviors you have adopted along your journey.
Prevent Addiction by Repairing Your Biggest Problems
If your car had been in a wreck and still had damage that affected how it worked, you would repair it before driving on the highway, right? Then why do you travel through life with emotional, mental, and spiritual problems you need to fix?
There are many people who are living with serious emotional damage caused by things such as:
- Heredity, because compulsive issues often pass from one generation to the next.
- Medical or psychological conditions that lead to anxiety, depression, or addiction.
- An upbringing involving abuse or neglect, or trials they face such as illness or divorce.
If there are significant problems in your life, they need to be repaired. That may call for working with a pastor, therapist, or psychiatrist or using a recovery or treatment program. Repairing the damage yourself using the five STEPS can help a great deal, but deep and lasting problems are best handled with support from people who have done that work before.
As you move forward, ongoing self-care can become a lifestyle you enjoy, and the benefits are life-changing and sometimes life-saving. There is a vaccine for addiction with useful material that goes along with this series on how to prevent addiction.
Do it for your family and those you care about. Do it for yourself. Because, there is hope, and you do have a positive future.
In this series of articles, we discussed 3 scenarios to learn how to prevent addiction. First was dealing with a sudden skid, and next was learning to handle a more gradually-occurring accident.
But the best option is to avoid the crash altogether by keeping your vehicle—you—in the best condition possible. The tools are there if you’re willing to do the work. Take it a step at a time, and you the people around you will be glad you did.
Question: People you know are struggling with addiction; will you help by sharing this material with them?
Action: To refresh your understanding, re-read this series starting with “How to Prevent Addiction” (Part 1).”
