No matter what causes the end of the world, most apocalypse scenarios in popular culture have one thing in common. Once you’re done running from zombies or hiding from nuclear fallout, it’s the perfect time to break into the liquor cabinet and have a hard drink.
Even so, consuming alcohol or drugs always puts you at risk of developing an addiction. In a survival situation, especially if you have a plethora of liquor stores or pharmacies to raid for supplies, the risk grows even higher.
Isolation makes it even harder to manage because you don’t have anyone around to check your consumption. You may find yourself drinking or using more to cope with the loneliness of being the only survivor in an area.
How can you avoid developing an addiction in isolation? How can you prepare to ensure the worst aspects of your isolation without turning to drugs and alcohol?
Increased Alcohol Consumption in Isolation
The COVID-19 Pandemic took the world by storm throughout 2020 and into 2021. One of the best ways to stay healthy was to stay home, isolating yourself from the rest of the world. While it proved effective, it also meant that many people were staying in their spaces alone. Isolation is difficult for humans. No matter how civilized we like to think we are, we’re pack animals, and we’re not meant to be alone.
This isn’t allegory — there’s science behind it. According to Julianne Holt-Lundstad, a psychology professor, “loneliness can lead to a wide variety of mental and even physical ailments that can cut short people’s lives.”
Loneliness can also contribute to substance abuse and addiction — and we saw a lot of that during the extended isolation periods we all experienced in 2020. A survey of adults over 21 found that 34% reported binge drinking, and more than 60% reported drinking more during isolation periods than they did before the pandemic.
If we see this sort of increase in alcohol use during a simple pandemic, with the end in sight, the risk gets compounded in survival or apocalypse situations where there might not be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Even outside of a historic event like a pandemic, loneliness and isolation are problems for people with addictions. Upwards of 75% of Americans report feeling lonely, and the temptation to turn to drugs or alcohol to dull the pain is tremendous. What can you do to avoid the risk of developing an addiction in isolation?
Understand the Addictive Process
We’ve been studying addiction collectively since the 1930s, but our perspective has changed dramatically in the intervening decades. Back then, scientists thought of addiction as a problem of willpower — simply, developing an addiction meant that someone didn’t have enough of it or that they were morally flawed somehow. “Treatments” for addiction at the time consisted of punishments or encouragements designed to help them somehow find the willpower to overcome the addiction.
Today, as our understanding of the human brain has advanced, so has our understanding of addiction. We know that addiction is a chronic disease, an illness that affects both the brain and body. It is all centered around the brain’s pleasure centers.
Anytime we experience something positive, our brain releases dopamine and other positive neurotransmitters. These chemicals are designed to encourage you to repeat that activity. In some cases — like the ‘runner’s high’ that you develop after exercise — this is a good thing because it can help you to create healthy habits. With addiction, this same pleasure principle can cause you to spiral downward into addiction, whether it’s with a substance or even your phone.
Over time, the body will develop a tolerance to various addictive substances, requiring more and more to achieve the same effect and trigger the brain’s same pleasure response. You may also feel compelled or conditioned to seek out this effect, which results from the brain rewiring itself to encourage more substance abuse. It is a dangerous cycle, and in a survival situation where you’re isolated from everyone around you, addiction can easily spiral down into overdose and eventually death.
Be Careful of Withdrawal
For those already living with addiction, a survival situation or apocalypse can make it more difficult to obtain an addictive substance. In these cases, withdrawal can be just as dangerous as addiction.
You’ll often hear about someone quitting “cold turkey” — a reference to the goosebumps that some people will get in the days after quitting that resembles a cold turkey skin — for things like cigarettes or other tobacco products. For things like alcohol or other addictive substances, whether they’re prescription or illicit, the withdrawal process is more dangerous. In some cases, it can even be deadly.
It can be tempting to try to quit cold turkey, thinking it might be easier, but the severity of the withdrawal symptoms can make it more likely that they’ll start using again, if only to ease the pain. This defeats the purpose of trying to stop entirely and can result in a fatal overdose. Avoiding addiction in the first place will be your best option, but for those already living with an addiction, withdrawal in a survival situation will be dangerous at best.
Collect Some Distractions
We live in a world of distractions, but sometimes that may be just what the apocalypse doctor ordered, especially if you find yourself living in isolation after the world ends. The chances are high that you’ll be spending a lot of time just managing the basics of surviving after whatever disaster destroyed society as we know it — collecting food, purifying water, building shelter, hiding from zombies, or fighting off super mutants — and there might not be a lot of time for anything else. For those concerned about addiction, it’s those downtimes, those periods of calm, that they need to worry about.
If you don’t have something to distract you, the temptation to use drugs or alcohol to pass the time is always there. Don’t give it a chance to get a foothold. In addition to food, water and medical supplies, make sure your survival shelter is stocked with distractions.
Raid your local bookstore or library for new things to read or instructional books to help you learn a new skill or adopt a new hobby. Maybe these are necessary skills to help you survive, like knitting warm clothes for the cold winter months or how to skin and clean game that you’ve hunted for food. Maybe they’re things that you always wanted to learn but never found the time before the world ended, like making stained glass or baking the perfect campfire souffle.
Whatever your flavor of distraction, make sure you have plenty of them on hand to fill those empty moments of your life where addiction would otherwise be a threat.
Limit Your Access
We realize that having things like alcohol and opioid painkillers around during an apocalypse can be helpful. Alcohol, for example, can also sterilize tools and wounds or help preserve food. Opioids, antibiotics and other modern medicines can help keep you alive if you get sick or injured since going to the doctor won’t be an option. They can also be valuable tools for trade if other survivor enclaves are open to the idea. Unfortunately, for people struggling with addiction, having them around presents more risk than reward.
If this is the case, make it a point to limit your access to these materials. If you need alcohol for sterilization, opt for isopropyl alcohol instead of the kind you can drink. It’s just as effective, just as readily available, and will serve the same purpose without presenting the temptation.
If you’re raiding a pharmacy for supplies, only take things that you need or can trade and avoid opioids or other addictive substances. Don’t grab them thinking that you’ll trade them for additional supplies, especially if you haven’t yet made contact with any other survivors.
The goal here is simply to limit access to things that might create a risk of developing an addiction in isolation during a survival situation. It’s probably going to be hard enough to survive as it is. Don’t make it harder by putting your body through the damaging addiction cycle when you should be worried about how you’re going to make it through the next day, week or month.
Learn How to Meditate
No matter what causes the world to end, you won’t be running at full speed all the time. Hiding quietly while a horde of zombies shambles past may take up the majority of a day, and all that time sitting in quiet contemplation is the perfect time to develop an addiction — or take steps to prevent one.
Mindfulness and meditation are valuable tools to help you regain control of your physical and mental health, whether you’re living with an addiction or at risk of developing one. A technique known as mindfulness-based relapse prevention uses both of these tools to help prevent individuals from derailing their recovery and relapsing.
Meditation and mindfulness can also help you improve your morale and keep you moving forward even if everything looks lost. Instead of focusing on what is going wrong or how the world is falling apart, being mindful means that you focus on living in the present moment.
That means focusing on being grateful for the food you have in your belly or the comfort of a reliable sidearm at your hip. You don’t mourn the past, and you don’t get anxious about the future. You just live in the moment, getting by day after day. You might be surprised how far that mentality can carry you.
Get Active
How far can you run in one session right now? This might not seem like the best use of your time if the world has ended, but the goal here is to fill your time with as much as possible, so you’re engaging your mind, body or both, from the moment you wake until the moment you close your eyes at night. Staying active and improving your physical health won’t just help keep you alive if you need to run for your life. It can be a valuable tool for preventing loneliness and addiction if you find yourself in isolation.
While it might not be safe to run around your neighborhood, and a treadmill is out of the question if the country’s infrastructure has collapsed, there are still ways to stay active even if you need to stay inside. Bodyweight exercises don’t require any gear and are usually very easy to get started. If you find that these are becoming too easy and you need weights, start by filling bags with sand, rocks or even your canned goods or jugs of water until you reach the level of challenge that you need.
Don’t push yourself to the point where you get injured, but staying active can be a great way to both prevent addiction in isolation and keep you healthy and strong enough to survive no matter what the world throws at you.
Practice Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
While typically practiced by psychologists and other mental health professionals, the basic tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be valuable for helping you avoid addiction in isolation.
These techniques help you identify the behaviors that might lead to addiction and break out of those patterns. The exact details of each person’s therapy vary. Some may spend time trying to explore the consequences of their drug use, while others use it to identify their triggers and cravings and use the therapy as a tool to avoid them.
Even if you weren’t in therapy or practicing these techniques before the world ended, you can still benefit from CBT. Next time you raid a library or bookstore for new books, consider stopping by the psychology section and picking up a book that can help you learn the basics. Better yet, make an appointment with your local therapist and learn the techniques firsthand. Consider it part of your survival training.
Find Support Where You Can
Most readily available information on avoiding addiction in isolation has the same theme: build a support group and surround yourself with friends and family. While this is admirable and effective, it isn’t always going to be possible in a survival situation.
There may not be another human being for miles in any direction. Unlike the 2020 Pandemic, where we had Zoom to keep us connected, if the internet fails or the power grid collapses, we will end up being truly alone.
That’s why it’s so important to find support and foster connections where you can. Connect with your neighbors if you can do so safely. Trade supplies with other survivors and use them as an opportunity to socialize. It’s not the perfect solution but being alone for the majority of the time is better than being alone all of the time.
Take The Apocalypse One Day At a Time
Survival situations are always going to be challenging. As a species, we’re not designed to be alone and spending long periods in isolation will test even the strongest survivor.
As with other stressful situations, make sure you’re taking life in the apocalypse one day at a time. Avoiding addiction in isolation will never be easy, but it is both possible and worth the effort.
[Note: This was a guest post.]
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