National Anti-Boredom Month and Addiction Recovery

First, if this is your first time reading this blog. My name is Matt and I’m a recovered(ing) Alcoholic, Addict, a technology entrepreneur, and founder of You Are Accountable. You can read more about my story here: https://www.youareaccountable.com/matt-celebrates-8-years-of-recovery

We do our best to write real, helpful, blog posts about addiction in addition to the recovery work we do to support our members at You Are Accountable. When looking at topics to blog about this month we came across that July is National Anti-Boredom month (yes it is a real thing).

At first, that gave the team here a chuckle, but we realized that being bored, and finding how to have fun again when you’re new in recovery is actually crucial and a super hard thing to do.

For me, in my early twenties, “day drinking” was by far the activity I looked forward to the most on my weekends. At the time, to me, nothing sounded like more fun than sitting out in the sun, and playing some beer pong or beersbee with some friends. Unfortunately, the reality is, towards the end of the day, I would be too messed up to enjoy it, if I even made it out at all.

Once I got sober, that activity was gone. I didn’t know how to hang out with my friends, or what to do with myself in general. In early recovery, being in a setting where everyone was drinking felt awkward at best, and at worst, made me extremely depressed.

The truth is that finding fun in recovery actually took a lot of work and trial and error in the beginning. But, like everything else with recovery from addiction, the hard and extremely uncomfortable work pays dividends in the long term.

I started out by thinking about what I used to enjoy before my addiction took hold. I realized that I had lost touch with literally every activity that used to make me happy. For me, it generally revolves around outdoor activities. I loved to hike, climb, camp, ski, play basketball, and of course hang out with friends. In comparison, spending my days drinking and using drugs seemed empty compared to those activities that I used to love.

At first, my re-entry to having sober fun was a lot of work. The first thing I did was rent a beach volleyball court and invited my friends. This felt SO awkward, but I’m so fortunate that I had supportive friends and actually had a lot of fun. However, the excitement was short lived and I was back trying to figure out how I fit in with my friends that still drank, albeit normally. I didn’t know who I was anymore now that I wasn’t the “party guy”.

The next thing I did was I got involved in my local 12 step community where I was able to find other young people that were navigating through the same challenges. At first, these “friendships” seemed to lack the depth I had with my longtime friends. With that being said it was still immensely helpful to find other people I could relate to and be with in order to fill that void in my life that had developed. Over time, these friendships actually evolved into something very special and now I have two groups of friends, sober and not sober, that actually all hang out together.

As time went on, another amazing thing happened. I started to feel comfortable in my own skin again. I realized that I was the same “party guy” as before, I just didn’t drink or do drugs now. That meant I was truly able to enjoy and participate in activities with my friends that drank while being sober. Since then, I’ve been to all my friends' bachelor parties, weddings, events, etc including my own.

Because of the uncomfortability I pushed through early on I truly can say I have a very non-boring life that is worth living and staying sober for. I have a beautiful family, and I had the wonderful gift of teaching my three year old daughter how to ski this year.

I’ll leave it at this, if you feel that your newly, or not so newly sober life is boring, and unfulfilled, think back to a time before you started abusing substances and start with those activities.

And of course, as they say, don’t quit before the miracle happens!

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