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hey there everybody and welcome back to the addiction and mental health Disorders Treatment manual I'm your host Dr Donnelly Snipes this is unit 1 part 21. we are finishing up the segment
on setting smart goals and figuring out how to set achievable relevant time limited goals
it's important to remember that Rome was not built in a day and your problem whatever it is
wasn't either so it's going to take time to make that change you want to ensure
that you give yourself the time to make those changes but as I mentioned in other parts it's
also important to make sure that you're getting rewards and you're seeing your
progress so you want to set goals that are time limited daily goals weekly goals monthly goals
the best goals are built on your strength and individualized so if you're trying to
address something like depression and one of the things that you want to see is improved energy
okay that's one of your benchmarks for moving towards happiness okay great so what strengths
what has worked for you before in the past to help improve your energy what is one of your strengths
focus on the things that you're motivated and able to change if you are trying to work towards
happiness well that's great there are a lot of things that you can do however there's also other
stuff going on in the world going on in life that is depressing anxiety provoking angering that you
cannot change focusing on yourself your inner environment and your immediate outer environment
is often a lot more doable in in terms of things that you're actually able to change
and then as I mentioned set those small time limited goals weekly daily or when you're
starting out sometimes it's hourly can I get through the next hour I didn't use this hour get
to next hour or I didn't cry or I didn't go back to bed once you can do it for an hour then maybe
do it for half a day and then maybe all day so gradually increase the time that you're trying to
exhibit that new Behavior
Behavior change like learning lines for a play you wouldn't expect to read the script once and
know it by heart you gotta rehearse it you're going to need prompts and assistance so in a
lot of the other videos that I uh that I do I talk about putting push notifications I talk
about journaling I talk about having a sponsor or a coach or somebody that can be there for
you I talk about mindfulness there are a lot of things that you can do to add to your environment
to help motivate you and remind you to make this change and use these new behaviors
as the new behaviors become more second nature As you move toward recovery the prompts you
need are going to be fewer it's going to become more default more autopilot than
it is right now but in the first three to six months especially when you're making a change
a lot of times prompts are required and Perfection is often an unreasonable goal you want to look
towards progress now when we're talking about addiction recovery for example remember relapse
starts long before you use so what you're looking for is if if you're not perfect in
your in your sobriety in your recovery ideally the relapse what you're looking at is going back into
stinking thinking and then catching it before you actually get all the way back down to using again
spend about 20 minutes thinking about your problem and your goal and what it's going
to look like when you've achieved your goal all of those things that are going to be different
what is the first thing that you're going to do in addiction recovery one of the things that we
often talk about is going to meetings 90 and 90. so you may say I'm going to
get clean by starting to go to meetings I've made a decision not to use and I'm going to
start doing this new Behavior instead of using how often am I going to do this 90 meetings 90 days
so you can look at it and say did I do it yes check the block when will this start today
it's great to set goals and it's great to say okay I'm going to do it this many times but
if you don't ever get started then you're never going to finish so you need to put a start date
and then ideally a finish date that way you know that how long you've got to accomplish it