5 Healthcare Benefits that Rehab can Provide

Rehab or rehabilitation facilities are professional institutions that help individuals with substance abuse and addiction.

With over 36 million people suffering from drug use, you aren’t alone. However, since most victims find it hard and often fail to recover without outside help, rehab can benefit their well-being. 

As addiction doesn’t develop in a single day or with a single drink, you need to attend weeks of individual and group therapy sessions to recover. Therefore, you need to mentally and physically prepare yourself. 

Here are five such health benefits that rehab can provide.  

Structured Routine

When you join a drug rehab program, you’re expected to follow a daily schedule that keeps you away from your triggers and distractions. 

By filling your life with different exercises, activities, and therapy sessions, the rehabilitation facilities provide a safe environment to practice healthy living. 

As an addict, your general routine must’ve involved destructive recreational practices. Your essential duties like work, relationships, and health are neglected to make room for your addiction. 

Rehab facilities strive to prevent access to these ruinous endeavors and fill the gaps with physical and psychological healthy habits. 

If one is honest, one will thrive on these new structured routines that promote health as the basis of living. 

You may feel that a few weeks of structured living may not be enough to sustain your goal of being addiction-free. But, these simple routines are developed in a way that you can follow them even without post-treatment support.

In an excellent rehab facility like the heights treatment, initial sessions focus on yoga or meditation classes, but depending on your facility, they may prefer cardio exercises as a means of relaxation. 

Mid-morning sessions are arranged with a therapist or counselor who focuses on treatment procedures, post-treatment behavior patterns, and recovery. 

After lunch, individual or target group therapy sessions are arranged to improve cognitive behavior, compassion, and trust to promote faster recovery by implementing inclusion and acceptance. 

Anger management, grief counseling, and stress management sessions may also be included in the therapy sessions. 

The objective of most therapies is to boost confidence. If you can gain authority over your addiction and addictive behaviors, learning what it means to stay sober won’t be that hard. 

Detoxification

Most care facilities offer a detox program that focuses on removing all traces of alcohol or drugs from your body. 

The principle of detoxification is simple—to improve psychological health through the means of physical well-being. 

Throughout the process, due to a sudden change in chemistry, your body goes through violent physical transmissions called “withdrawal symptoms.” These symptoms vary from person to person and substance to substance, but often include nausea, vomiting, headache, and fever. 

However, these aren’t signs of bad health. These are just repercussions of unhealthy habits. 

Your body has forgotten what was normal. It has become used to match your addiction and dopamine levels. These symptoms only signify improvement and recovery. 

Although you may be fine neglecting these symptoms, they can be morbid in severe cases. Consider seeking help within your facility for a softer recovery. 

Moreover, as the detoxification facilities are designed to minimize withdrawal effects, you have a higher chance of quitting your addiction than doing it on your own. 

A Health Promoting Environment 

A safe and supportive environment is essential to recovering from addiction.

The events that trigger your addiction, no matter how indispensable they are, can’t be the supportive space you are seeking. 

You may believe you can control yourself in these situations and win the challenge, but your probability of giving in at some point is greater than your flying over it.   

Rehab facilities gather survivors like yourself who are like-minded and have already faced what you’re going through. 

The fear of judgment you now feel about your addiction is absent within those walls—promoting a safer and more supportive environment. 

Psychological Health Benefits

Drugs rewire your brain. With a longer addiction period, your feelings of pleasure, reward, and motivation are decreased with the habituation of an increased dopamine level. You feel less motivated, procrastinate, and lose interest in anything other than sustaining your addiction. 

With rehab and recovery, you can achieve a similar level of brain activity.

Here are some physiological benefits of de-addiction: 

Less Anxiety

Alcohol, opioids, and cocaine induce your nerves to calm you down while being intoxicated. But once the effects have worn off, you can feel more anxious and experience mood swings than normal. 

These effects, in the long term, increase the risk of developing anxiety. Moreover, you may also feel anxious about hiding your addiction from others while intoxicated or after. 

Rehab therapies help you manage anxiety episodes with counseling and drug therapy. By being sober, you limit the risk of developing anxiety due to drug and alcohol abuse. 

Reduced Guilt and Depression

Addicts frequently face the wrath of societal judgment and develop early-stage depressive disorders. 

Rehab facilities offer a judgment-free environment that liberates you from thinking about what others are thinking—either about your addiction or your recovery journey. 

Most addicts wake up to a loss before admitting that they’re addicted. Their loss might be a relationship, a job, or maybe something material, but irrespective of the reason, they feel guilty about themselves. 

By addressing these issues and accepting the situation, rehab facilities help you reduce guilt and the risk of developing depression. 

Breaking the Negative Loop

We get addicted to feeling good—we feel bad for being addicted—we abuse the substance to feel good. It’s the typical feedback loop for any individual victim of substance abuse. 

Therapy, adding to the feeling of a safe space, helps you break the chain. As you aren’t judged In a controlled group or rehab facility, the need to feel good about yourself diminishes and a healthy lifestyle replaces the reward mechanism. 

In a few weeks, you get back to an almost normal level of dopamine and can start enjoying little things in life that you used to before. This is also why therapy is harder in the initial stages and starts becoming more and more rewarding with time. 

Physical Health Benefits

The physical effects of substance abuse vary with the nature of the drug and the extent of the addiction. Let’s discuss some of the most common health hazards that most addictions cause. 

Cardiovascular Disease

Most substances, including alcohol and cigarettes, elevate blood pressure and heart rate for an extended period. The elevated features put pressure on your heart and increase the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. 

Symptoms of cardiovascular diseases include: 

• Chest pain, chest discomfort, and chest tightness. If you already have developed heart diseases in blood vessels, you may show these symptoms. In most cases, the damages done by the substances are reversible to an extent. 
• Shortness of breath. Narrower blood vessels limit the amount the oxygen reaching the brain and whole body—making you gasp for air. Diet, exercise, and drug therapy are particularly effective to mitigate the issue.
• Racing heartbeat (Arrhythmia). An irregular heartbeat is a major symptom of heart-related diseases. As drugs damage the heart muscles by making the heart pump harder, it’s perceived as a common side-effect.
• Swollen legs and ankles.
• Fainting

These symptoms are pretty common among substance abusers. Although rehab can’t help you reverse the damage, it can guide you to take the right healthcare path that you deserve. 

Cancer

Cigarettes and alcohol are major contributors to lung, liver, head, and neck cancer-related deaths worldwide. Anabolic steroids and injection drugs also increase the risk of liver tumors and hepatitis B and C. 

Symptoms of cancer vary with the type. But some critical ones include: 

• Visible lump or thickening. If you’ve developed cancer close to your skin or epidermis, you can feel a growing lump with touch. However, most cancerous lumps that develop in your internal organs can’t be visually detected. 
• Weight loss or gain. Unintended weight loss or gain is a common symptom. If you have an undiagnosed weight change issue, it may be due to it.  
• Unexplained fevers. As your body tries to fight the cancer cells, you may develop rapid fevers without any warnings. 
• Unexplained muscle pain. Muscle twitching, muscle pain, and fatigue are associated with several types of cancers.

Cancer takes a long time to develop. Therefore, if you haven’t yet started to show symptoms, you can be beneficial by joining a rehab program as soon as possible. 

HIV/AIDS

Drug abuse promotes sexual risk-taking behavior among teens and young adults. Indulging in penetrative, oral, and same-gender sex with strangers without protective means is identified as a common practice among teens—increasing the risk of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. 

Common acute and chronic HIV/AIDS symptoms include: 

• Fever
• Headache
• Sore throat
• Weight loss
• Oral thrush
• Herpes
• Pneumonia
• Swollen lymph nodes

Rehab, by helping you recover from your addiction, reduces the risk of these diseases and several others. 

The Bottom Line

Congratulations on your de-addiction journey and considering rehab as support. By relying on a structured routine, you can minimize distractions and recover faster. With detoxification efforts, withdrawal symptoms are minimized. Several psychological and physical benefits are also realized through the health-promoting environment of rehab. 

Wellness and Fitness

TDPel Media

This article was published on TDPel Media. Thanks for reading!

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