Taking a vacation is meant to be for fun and relaxation. However, if care is not taken, it could turn out to be a form of stress for them. While on vacation, there is a need for you to ensure that you enjoy yourself devoid of any form of stress.

The steps listed below, are quintessential in helping you have a good vacation during recovery:

• Interact with people on the trip: Now, it is essential that while you are on vacation, you make conscious efforts to relax. For individuals who have not been in recovery before, they have no idea how tough a vacation can be. Hence, it is required that you make people understand that you are just leaving your comfort zone, and there is a need for them to exercise extra patience with you.

• Remain connected with support groups and resources: A good number of times, it happens that people with whom we have our vacation with, are not usually the best of support. Bearing this in mind, if you have a support group back at home, ensure you make plans to remain in touch with them. The most effective form of communication in this sense, is to use social media platforms such as Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp and the likes.

• Take a break from social media platforms: Social media platforms are interesting, and taking a vacation from them could be quite difficult. However, staying frequently on social media platforms has its own stress too. Hence, when you are going on vacation, you need to make sure that you do not frequent the social media as you use to. If possible, you can leave these platforms totally all through your vacation, it would be worth your while, as you would use that time to do something more productive.

• Select your self-care: You should bear in mind that vacations are meant to be about relaxation and fun. You need to know what works for you. In that sense, there is a huge need for you to do something which would leave you invigorated, instead of being bored all through your vacation. You can decide to play videogames, do a book review, see movies amongst others.

WHAT AN ADDICTION REHAB INVOLVES

Basically, an addiction rehab process comprises four essential steps which are: Intake, detox, rehabilitation and ongoing recovery.

INTAKE

This process involves determining if a rehab centre is good for you or not. At the rehab centre, you would be asked some certain questions, and from your answers, they would decide if there is a need for you to do some tests or not. The centre would be interested in finding out the degree of addiction, your family’s history as regards addiction and a host of others.

Rehab facilities would offer some programs which are:

• Inpatient service
• Outpatient service
• The merger of both

DETOX

A good number of addictions which involves both alcohol and drugs, usually need a stage of detoxification. The benefit of having a detox is, it eliminates all signs of alcohol and drugs from the body. In most cases, there could be medication which is given for the purpose of reducing the withdrawal symptoms which could be linked with some drugs such as heroin.

Generally, detoxification is a safe process if it takes place in a medical setting that is well supervised.

REHABILITATION

After the individual has gone through the detoxification stage, the next phase is having to go through rehabilitation. This is the point where the patients would fully understand why they are addicted, and they would be aided in addressing the issues behind the addiction, so that they can continue with their lives without having to relapse to their addictive nature.

Under rehabilitation, there are some phases which are essential:

• Individual therapy
• Group therapy
• Family therapy

RECOVERY

An essential point which should be noted is, after patients have completed their rehabilitation program, their recovery phase has not finished. As a matter of fact, for some individuals, recovery could be something which would take the rest of their life to complete. Sometimes, the path to recovery could be smooth for some, while for the others, it could be extremely difficult, because they would often face the temptation to relapse.

When a patient is done with rehabilitation, it is essential that the patient gets in touch with counsellors, in order to make plans for an aftercare. A good number of addiction rehab facilities have some follow-up programs which would help patients to get back to their regular life.