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When is it Too Late to Recover from Addiction?

woman researches addiction recovery programs

Anyone can develop a substance use disorder, regardless of age. Risk factors may change throughout your life, but they are always there. If you’ve struggled with substance use for most of your adult life, it’s easy to become pessimistic about your chances for recovery. You may have failed to get sober before, you feel like you’ve already alienated all the people who matter to you, or you may thinks there’s just no point to changing now. However, recovery can always be worthwhile, no matter what stage of life you’re in or how many setbacks you’ve faced. Here’s why it’s never too late to recover from addiction.

There’s never an easy time to recover from addiction.

It’s tempting to feel like 40, 50, or 60 years old is too late to try to recover from addiction. You might think it would have been possible at, say, 20, but now it’s just too much a part of who you are. While addictive behavior does tend to get more entrenched the longer it lasts, it’s not as if there’s ever an easy time to beat addiction. What’s more, while you do have some advantages overcoming addiction at a younger age, you have some pretty serious disadvantages as well. For example, your brain hasn’t even fully developed until you’re 25. You also don’t have much life experience. Maturity and experience can be major assets in overcoming addiction.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

There’s an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now. You may feel like it would have been worth the effort 20 years ago to quit drugs and alcohol, but there’s no point now. That’s not true at all. While getting treatment at a young age might have allowed you to live more of your life without addiction, getting treatment now will still be better than never getting it at all. We can only make the best choices available to us right now and right now, treatment and recovery will improve your life going forward.

Recovery is day to day.

People often have the idea that addiction is something you can get fixed and not worry about for the rest of your life. In that case, it might feel like trying to overcome addiction late in life is a lost cause. However, whatever age you start, managing addiction is something you have to do every day. There’s no happily ever after. You just have to wake up every day and decide you’re not going to drink or use drugs that day.

People do succeed after several tries.

If you have a history of trying to quit drugs and alcohol and failing, it’s tempting to just give up. However, you haven’t really failed until you stop trying. Many people have a long recovery after several failed attempts. You learn something from each attempt and each failure. Every time you start over, you know something you didn’t know last time and that increases your odds of success.

Arbor Behavioral Healthcare offers an integrative and holistic approach to treat substance abuse and a wide variety of addictions, as well as underlying mental health and psychological issues. All of the addiction recovery programs offered by The Arbor are designed to heal the mind, body, and spirit leading to a lifetime of sobriety, health and wellness. If you’re ready to find healing and restoration in a peaceful, loving environment, please call us today at 844-560-7269