If you’ve spent time in a drug or alcohol rehab facility, you received a great deal of help. Even after you leave this kind of facility, there’s a good chance that you will still receive a lot of help. This help could include sobriety meetings, individual therapy, group therapy, medication-assisted therapy (MAT), or other forms of treatment.

All of these treatments can be useful. But do you know that there are other things that you can do to help your recovery? These actions don’t require the help of other people but can be quite effective. As a bonus, many of these things do not require huge amounts of money or huge periods of time. To help with your recovery, you can

• Research drug and alcohol abuse. You can buy books, borrow them from your library, or read them on electronic devices. You can also look for information on the Internet, but look for web sites affiliated with government agencies and universities. Not everyone on the Internet is an expert, although many people think they are.
• Use worksheets and tests (personality tests, psychological profiles) from books and reputable web sites. Completing these worksheets can help you learn about yourself. If you know more about yourself, you can work to highlight your strengths and eliminate your weaknesses.
• Write in a journal. Like researching and test taking, journal writing (or journaling) is a good, inexpensive way we can learn about ourselves. We could learn about our triggers, for example. Triggers are factors that could lead us to abuse drugs or alcohol. By writing in our journals, we might record incidents where we abused drugs or alcohol or wanted to abuse such substances.

To help ourselves recover from drug or alcohol abuse, we need to learn about ourselves. This might be the most important lesson we ever have to learn.