When you’re searching for information about rehab and how rehab works, a lot of websites will encourage you to phone them and get into rehab right away. Rehab can be a very effective tool to learn techniques to recover and to hit reset when you’re in a bad place.
Rehab isn’t a magic pill that fixes everything, you won’t complete rehab and then just never have any temptations or urges again, but rehab can help teach you better ways to handle those temptations, to help you better understand what alcohol does to you and your life, and to give you the tools you need to stay sober.
We believe that helping people understand what to expect from rehab, like answering the question is there free time in rehab, is a good way to dispel some of the anxiety that could come along with trying rehab.
Some people really, desperately need rehab. They’re at a point where they don’t have the tools to help themselves, but they might be hesitant to reach out to rehab because they don’t know what it will be like. That’s what we’re hoping to address in our upcoming series of articles about rehab.
Today, the question we’re looking at is whether or not you’ll have free time in rehab.
Perhaps you’re thinking of attending a rehab, but you’re worried it’ll just be 24/7 miserable and uncomfortable and you won’t have a moment to yourself. While every facility can vary slightly in its approach, the overall methodologies are fairly similar and time-tested, and you will have some free time each day to spend on doing whatever you would like.
Here’s the kicker – you’ll start to enjoy that free time a lot more than you are used to, most likely. As an alcoholic, it’s common to fill your free time with anxious thoughts, thinking about drinking, or just drinking and not doing much of any time. In any case, when you’re sober living at rehab, you’ll start to value your free time a lot more and you’ll want to make the most of it.
What Can You Do In Free Time at Rehab?
You could choose to spend your free time doing something physical like working out, playing basketball or tennis, going for a swim, or something else – depending on what your particular rehab facility has available.
There is free time in rehab, and it’s a good opportunity to rekindle an old hobby or passion or to find something new altogether.
If you don’t feel like doing something physical, you can always cozy up with a book, go for a walk, write in a journal, or do something else a bit more reflective.
Some people like to do physical activities in order to help calm their minds and to make them feel good and peaceful, whereas other people will achieve a similar feeling by reading, writing, or something else that stimulates their minds.
Others just like to lay in the sun and daydream.
It’s your free time, you can do what you want with it at rehab.
What About the Rest of the Time?
Even though there is free time to do what you want at rehab, there is still a lot of structure in a day, which is a good thing. You can turn off your brain and go with the flow, without having to worry about anything else at all in your life beyond getting better.
This is why rehab can be so powerful, it can take you out of your day-to-day life and the usual things that trigger you to drink. That in and of itself is very helpful, but beyond that, you’ll learn how to reflect on your life, you’ll learn about why you drink in the first place (it can be a lot deeper and more complex than you might imagine), and you’ll gain valuable insights and tools to help keep you from drinking in the future.
