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If your car is careening out of control or you see an accident coming, there are techniques you can learn that can help you avoid a crash. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the danger from happening in the first place?
A good way to protect against automobile accidents is to ensure your vehicle is inspected, maintained, and repaired 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. If addiction is in the picture, a loss of control has much higher odds of happening. But if you maintain the vehicle—manage your well-being with wellness-based life skills—ahead of time, you can avoid the skid altogether and prevent addiction from becoming a life-altering problem. Instead, you can learn to live life better.
Prevent Addiction by Maintaining the Right Behaviors
The vehicle you navigate through life—yourself—has components that are spiritual, emotional, mental, social, 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 resentment or control.
- If you lose self-awareness, you will repeat your 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 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 way to implement a 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 may have adopted along the way. Those five steps are spiritually-based so your journey—transformation—can help you develop a whole new way of living effectively.
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 damage caused by things such as:
- Ingrained negative behaviors due to habits we developed to prevent or dull our pain.
- Medical or psychological conditions that can lead to anxiety, depression, or addiction.
- Previous trauma 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 should also be handled with support from people who have done that work before.
Getting help embodies courage and strength, not weakness. Part of your journey should be learning more about recovery, because that is a wonderful and enjoyable way to change your life. I know, because it helped change mine.
And just as you might take your car to the original dealer for knowledgeable repair, you can ask your Creator to help with any damage you are dealing with so you can experience the lifestyle of peace, joy, and purpose you were designed to have.
Continuing a Wonderful Way of Living a Step at a Time
Moving forward, self-care can become an enjoyable life-style with benefits that are life-changing and sometimes life-saving. You can utilize the vaccine for addiction with useful material that goes along with this series on how to prevent addiction.
It’s okay not to feel okay but you don’t have to stay that way. Many others have been where you are and improved their lives one step at a time. Do it for you and your family and those you care about. There is hope, and you 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 into disaster, and next was learning how 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 to help you along that journey. Take it a step at a time, and you and 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).”
