The journey to recovery is a long and arduous one, be it heartbreak, miscarriage, mental health, drug or alcohol abuse. You need a treatment plan to help you overcome the dark days and hard times. In the process of achieving personal healing, people are exploring new and diverse ways, one of which is Photography.
Experts in addiction recovery have recommended that picking up a new hobby is an excellent way to recover from addiction. One of such hobbies is Photography. Here is how people are using Photography to help themselves recover from addiction.
Self-Expression And Mindfulness
As an alcohol abuser or drug addict, when you decide to seek help for yourself, you’ll need to retrace your way back to your everyday life. So that, when you check yourself into a rehabilitation center to try out treatment programs that can help you find a new purpose in life, it revolves around using evidence-based therapies. This evidence-based therapy includes finding new hobbies to use in channeling your self-expression and mindfulness.
Photography is a form of mindfulness. When you are looking through the camera lens while shooting a sunset view, you notice the sun’s brightness, which your addiction never allowed you to acknowledge. You see tiny details more and soak them in as they would eventually become part of your new routine and path to your healing process. Also, you can go outside, set up your camera, take snapshots of yourself. Documenting this process is a form of self-expression that motivates you to see how far you have come and keeps you mindful of your journey towards healing at your own pace.
Lowers Stress Hormones
According to experts, visual art has a unique benefit known as psychological resiliency, a kind of resilience that you encounter when you look at the world in an art form and eases off a sizable amount of dopamine from your body, making you feel better.
One thing that causes a relapse during addiction recovery is stress, but when you pour yourself into making art, dopamine increases, and you get to bask in the flow of muse, angles, and creating art. It also helps you prevent depressive-like behaviors.
Creates An Escape Route
Art gives you an avenue to express your feelings and emotions. Photography can serve as an escape room for you to release all the dark energies, document your life experiences and identify the challenges holding you down.
The key that Photography gives you as a recovering addict is how to keep track of your emotions and document them, so you could be better at handling your relapses or know how to escape from them when you feel like it.
Finding Support Group
People are open to using art therapy to heal themselves and offer a helping hand to other victims. Many former addicts have created support groups for themselves through sharing a common hobby of Photography and navigating addiction recovery.
Recovering from addiction is a long journey, but choosing photography therapy could help you streamline the healing process and achieve a more productive life.