5 Rules You Must Follow While Living In A Sober House
Addiction recovery has a lot of challenges, both during and after recovery, and sober houses are there to ease the way out!
Sober houses are the transitional house between drug rehabilitation centers and your normal life.
Sober living facilities like this one in CT provide a safe space to recovering addicts before they are ready to settle back into a normal life. While sober houses might be a breath of fresh air as compared to the extremely strict environment of rehab centers, there still are rules that residents must follow in order to help the recovering themselves and their fellow residents maintain their sobriety.
Rules You Must Follow While Living In A Sober House
1. Follow The Curfew
Everyone has to follow a strict curfew while living in a sober house. Which means that people are free to go outside to run errands, work or attend school but they have to come back to the sober house on time. This is to keep a check on their sobriety while still easing them into a normal life.
Following a curfew also helps people learn to maintain a balance in life, which long-term addicts especially don’t have. People who haven’t been in rehab and only want to maintain sobriety can also enroll in sober houses and come to live there in order to escape the urge of drugs.
2. Participate In Chores
One of the clear rules about sober houses is participating in house chores. The chores include running/emptying the dishwasher, cleaning electronics, mopping the house, mowing the lawn, doing laundry or cleaning the pool. The purpose of these chores is to teach people basic life skills and the importance of community and the role they have to play in it. Chores are rotated weekly or monthly so everyone has a chance to do something different every once in a while instead of repeating the same routine.
3. Attend Group Support Meetings
Humans are called social animals for a reason; we tend to function better while living in communities and interacting with people. Same goes with recovery. People tend to understand others’ struggles when they can relate to them. Learning from people with the same issues and collaborative environment helps fight addiction better. So everyone has to participate in group support meetings to be able to share their experiences and struggles!
4. Observe Quiet Hours
Addiction can cause sleepless nights and lazy days. Anyone that has suffered from addiction can seriously mess up their sleep schedule, leading to insomnia and if it goes untreated, can cause psychosis.
Study shows that people who have had recovery can still fall into psychosis and have to be admitted to psych wards all because of no sleep! And quiet environments are best to boost your mental health by practicing stillness. For both these reasons, quiet hours are observed at night and in mornings.
5. Not Using Any Addictive Substance
We are all guilty of sniffing into petrol or whiteners at some point! These substances are actually really easy to get off to and contain addictive materials. A lot of these things are found in everyday products like coffee, cigarettes, hair sprays, pain killers etc. So anything and everything that even has the slightest hint of causing addiction or relapse is not allowed inside a sober living home. The rules are harsh but they’re for the good of the residents. Regular informed and uninformed drug tests are performed to check for any addictive substances on the residents and if found, the substances are removed immediately.
There are a lot of minor other rules like internet restrictions, travel bans, getting a part-time job and completing the 12 step programs that help the residents maintain their sobriety and learn to control the urges of addiction under different circumstances. Rules also teach regularity and which is really important especially for people who have not been sober in a long time!
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