In 2020, 40.3 million U.S. adults (Aged 12 and older) struggled with a drug or alcohol use disorder. With 6.29% of the U.S. population struggling with drugs and alcohol, 3 out of every 50 Americans has a substance use problem.
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Finding inspiration and motivation as you move into recovery can be difficult. For many of us, finding a mantra, a song, or even a quote can be incredibly helpful – both as a distraction and coping mechanism and as inspiration. That often means finding words you align with, that mean something to you, and that help you to move forward. These 10 inspiring quotes are a place to start. However, if they don’t align with what you feel, you can always choose something that is meaningful to you in other ways.
Bradley Cooper, best known for acting in films like A Star is Born and The Hangover, was once an addict. Today, he’s outspoken about recovery and the fact that getting clean and sober allowed him to get where he is today. His quote, which is about deliberately taking control of his life by putting down alcohol, is empowering to everyone. If you can put alcohol down, you can build yourself up to where you want to be in other parts of life – because going into recovery empowers the rest of your life. While you will have to focus on that recover for the near future, you are setting yourself up to live the life you want to live, to connect with the people you want to connect with, and to connect with yourself.
The author of Seven Days Sober and A Sober Year is an obvious choice for sharing quotes from, but her most famous is “Getting sober is a radically creative act”. That simple quote is a direct challenge to years of stigma and the idea that people are most creative, most social, most friendly, most alive when drinking or using. We’ve had decades of media pushing the story of the addicted artist – but getting clean is the truly radically creative act. Getting clean is not a thing you do for others, it is a thing to free yourself, to build yourself up, and to create a new version of you that you want to live with. That act of creation will help you to live the life you want to live – giving you the option to do so.
The famous quote about moving forward at any pace you want, so long as you don’t stop has been told and told again. For many, it’s most familiar in the story of the turtle and the hare – in which the hare boasts about being able to go fast – but it is the slow and steady pace of the turtle that eventually wins the race. Eventually, it doesn’t matter how fast you go, so long as it’s sustainable, so long as you keep picking up, and so long as you keep moving forward. Every step of recovery can be difficult. Every single process can be set with pitfalls. You might spend days where you spend more time going backwards than forwards. The important thing is that you always pick back up and start moving forward again.
Joseph Goldstein is well-known to many people taking part in mindfulness-based recovery – because he helped to popularize mindfulness in the west. The quote, which comes from the book, “The Experience of Insight”, is similar in meaning to the one above. Once you start on the path or recovery all you have to do is keep going. All you have to do is stay pointed in the right direction. That might include setbacks. It might include relapse, But once you figure out where you’re going, you can just keep moving forward with that path. Of course, it’s never that simple. Staying in the right direction is hard. But you’ve made the first step in the right direction, you’ve made the first step towards the rest of your life and where you want to be and you should be able to continue and keep up motivation.
Ilya Prigogine is best-known for his Nobel Prize in chemistry, but his quote “The way to cope with the future is to create it” is one of the more popular in addiction recovery. The quote, which was about coping with the massive life changes caused by the atomic bomb, has nothing to do with recovery. But, it does mean that the best way to move forward is to build a new life for yourself. And, that’s incredibly powerful when you’re trying to do just that. The future is incredibly scary. Moving forward without drugs and addiction is incredibly scary. But you can build a future for yourself and you can make a life that you want to be in. And that is an incredibly powerful inspiration for most of us.
6. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”– Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith’s famous quote is actually about saying that drunkenness is not a moral failing so long as one is willing to get back up again. In this case, that means getting back up from addiction, in putting one foot in front of the other, and in consistently picking yourself back up. That’s important whether this is your first time in recovery or if you’ve failed in the past. Being able to get up, to keep going, and to persevere, even in the face of failure, is the key to recovery. Real recovery isn’t your willingness to put drugs or alcohol down the first time, it’s your ability to keep doing it and to stop yourself from doing it again. To fail and to pick yourself back up again.
The author of Safety in Numbers is a well-known recovery coach for eating disorders, and her quote about one behavioral disorder applies very well to another. Burgunder was talking about eating disorders. But, that reminder that failing recovery is failing yourself is important. Failing recovery is failing your hopes and dreams for the future. It’s letting yourself down. Each time you slip up, you make it harder for yourself to keep going. And that’s important in a world that tends to glamorize drug and alcohol use, especially when you might be tempted to do so yourself as well.
Recovery is not easy. Getting clean and sober is not easy. There is nothing about rebuilding yourself and tearing down old habits and behaviors that is easy. At the same time, that effort and work will help you to build a life that you want to live, it will help you to put yourself in a position where you can be happy, where you can enjoy the little things, and where you can be proud of yourself. That’s worth every bit of hard work you put in now. As the quote says, it’s never going to be easy, but it will be worth it.
In “This Bridge Called my Back” feminist writer Cherrie Moraga shared an old quote about moving forward. It’s intended to say that you have to create new ideas and new ideology to move forward, you have to figure out who you are in the future, and you can’t let the past and the past version of you get in the way. That can be incredibly inspiring as you move forward on your journey of recovery. That’s also important to keep in mind. The past, substance abuse, and your past habits and behaviors will steal your ability to enjoy the present, they will drag you back into substance abuse, it is on you to prevent that so that you can grasp your future.
Most of us are very accustomed to hearing that substance abuse makes us happy. Drinking is the thing you do when you want to feel good. Drugs are an escape. We use social lubricants. The thing is, drinking doesn’t make us happy. It gets in the way. Campbell’s powerful quote reminds us that the real reason we want to quit drugs and alcohol is that we want to be happy. And, if we want to do that, we have to put in the work to get clean and sober.
Finding motivation and inspiration to move into recovery and stay in recovery is one of the most important parts of recovery. Quotes can help you to get there. They can provide reminders of what you’re fighting for. And, they can give you inspiration as you try to move forward. Hopefully, you align with one of these and can find some help and inspiration here.
If you or your loved-one struggles from substance abuse please contact us today to learn more about our detox and residential treatment programs. We’re here to help you recover.
For many of us, alcoholism is characterized by excessive alcohol use. Most of us associate that with chemical use disorder or chemical dependency – chalking up all problems to that chemical dependency.
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For many of us, our first visit to Alcoholics Anonymous or any other self-help group is off-putting. We don’t want to be there.
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Vaping or vaporizing is an increasingly popular habit, in which liquid solutions, normally tobacco, are vaporized and inhaled as steam. Vaporizers were originally marketed as a safer and cleaner alternative to cigarettes and are today used by an estimated 9% of the U.S. population, or 35 million adults. This upswing in popularity is concerning, not just because vaporizers have only been on the market for a decade, but also because they consistently function as a sort of “gateway” drug, in that high vaporizer usage is associated with drug and alcohol usage. While this is correlation and not likely causation, easy access to large quantities of nicotine may play a role in forming addictions – which eventually lead to other addictions.
That’s especially critical as 1 in 5 high school students now uses a vaporizer, according to the CDC. With an estimated 1 in 5 middle school students doing the same, “vaping” is quickly being picked up by the populations who are most vulnerable to drug addiction and abuse.
Vaporizers rapidly heat a liquid medium to turn it into a gas or steam. This liquid, which is normally sold in cartridges, can contain anything from no nicotine to extremely high doses of nicotine, equivalent to several cigarettes at once. For example, some are intended to contain a single cigarette of nicotine in a puff – supposedly with the intent of reducing the needed volume of “smoking”. Unfortunately, this efficiency rarely results in the intended effect. Instead, people consistently enjoy puffing on a vaporizer. In fact, following vaporizers being introduced to the market, cases of nicotine poisoning rose from an average of 1 per day to over 215 per day.
Vaporizer cartridges are also sold with flavor, marijuana, or other substances – meaning that someone using a vaporizer might be inhaling sugar, nicotine, or a stronger drug.
Vaporizers are very commonly used to smoke marijuana, especially in the medical community. Vaporizing marijuana preserves more of the active ingredients than smoking – meaning that cannabis can be better dosed and better controlled. That’s while reducing contamination from tar and smoke, which can greatly reduce short-term lung pollution. At the same time, it makes cannabis products more accessible and more discrete for those abusing the drug – making it easier to pass off as tobacco or a flavored e-liquid.
So, vaporizers make it somewhat safer for people to use cannabis. At the same time, they introduce risks in the same manner they introduce risks for tobacco products. If it’s easy to inhale 20 inhales in a row – it’s easier to take significantly too much and to start having problems. For example, while marijuana has a very low addiction profile, about 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 users will start to show signs of addiction over time – with vaporizers, it’s much easier to escalate to the kinds of quantities that result in addiction.
Many people use vaporizers for recreational usage. That can result in attempting to add other drugs, which are less safe. In fact, 85% of all vaporizer users occasionally put something other than tobacco or marijuana in their vaporizer. However, these incidents are experimental and incidental at most.
On the other hand, some meth and DMT users are actually switching to using vaporizers rather than glass pipes. For the most part, that’s a very good thing – considering glass pipes result in hundreds of injuries every year. Vaporizers are unlikely to explode or break from the heat. In addition, they’re less likely to burn hands or to start fires. Yet, most research shows that their usage is fairly incidental. Therefore, there is currently no evidence of widespread usage of vaporizers for heavier drugs.
Vaporizers allow someone to have near-unlimited access to cannabis or nicotine, through a cartridge. For example, most nicotine cartridges contain anywhere from 400-600 doses of nicotine. A 1ml cartridge of “normal” rather than “strong” or “extra strength” e-liquid is normally equivalent to 3-7 cigarettes. A 3ml cartridge can equate to as many as 21 at normal strength, or as many as 70+ at extra strength. With nothing to stop you from going through that at any pace, there’s nothing to stop you from inhaling tobacco at a rate that would be difficult to impossible with traditional cigarettes.
That ability to quickly and easily get a hit of something, without regards to being indoors or out, and without the restrictions of cigarettes, can make it easier to become addicted. That’s especially true for those who already have a problem with tobacco or who have a history of relying on substances to get themselves through the day.
Eventually, vaporizers offer a lot of harm reduction over smoking cigarettes or joints. Without the smoke and tar, they reduce lung pollution. Often, that means it’s safer and easier for people to use the substances they want. However, vaporizers also result in risks for people who have poor impulse control or who have strong habits to puff and smoke. That can be especially dangerous for those with a long history of smoking or those with addictive personalities.
Vaporizers aren’t bad. However, if someone doesn’t’ smoke, it’s always better to avoid starting altogether. If you do smoke, it’s better to use quantity control when switching to vaporizers – because the amount of nicotine or cannabis you inhale can greatly increase when you switch to a cartridge. Buying smaller cartridges, only using a certain number of cartridges per week, etc. Keeping track of how much you’re smoking and when is important if you want to stay in control.
And, of course, people with a past history of substance abuse, minors, and individuals with documented issues with quantity control should never use vaporizers. They’re too easy to abuse and too easy to escalate into an addiction, even with tobacco. If you have a therapist, you can always ask how they feel, although, in most cases, it’s just better if you don’t start.
Vaporizers are not a cause for alarm. However, they are easy to abuse, they can result in addiction, and people with addiction or addictive personalities can rely on them. In some rare cases, people use them to smoke stronger drugs – but in almost every case, those people were smoking stronger drugs using more dangerous methods first. At the same time, millions of teens and young people are using vaporizers, which could lead them to nicotine addiction and reliance on substances.
If you or your loved-one have any questions about our drug rehab or alcohol rehab programs please contact us today and speak with one of our experienced and professional intake advisors. We’re here to help you recover.
If you’re struggling with drugs or alcohol, you’re likely wondering how that impacts the rest of your life.
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If you’re getting sober for the first time, the first thing that might strike you is just how much time you have. The more you drink, the less time you have and the less memory you have of that time.
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