5 Harm Reduction tips to help you improve your relationship with drugs and alcohol

Harm reduction is a great way to help you assess and improve your relationship with drugs and alcohol so that you can avoid the negative effects of addiction and overuse. Harm reduction is a central part of my philosophy in drug and alcohol counseling and I find it very helpful for people struggling with their drinking or drug use.

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0:00:00: Hi, everyone, today I want to talk a little bit about harm reduction and how you can use it to reduce the negative effects that you might be experiencing as a result of your drug and alcohol use. So harm reduction is the newer philosophy in addiction treatment developed, I think in the '90s. And what harm reduction seeks to do is get support for people who are not ready to quit their drug of choice completely, but still wanna reduce the associated harm that comes along with their drug use. So while an abstinence-based approach is gonna tell you the response, the best response to addiction is to stop completely, to go to rehab, to do 12-step. What a harm reduction approach says is, "We recognize that some people aren't gonna be able to stop completely, we accept that drug use is a part of the human experience, and rather than trying to get you to stop, let's work together to find ways to reduce the harm that's associated with the use." Hence harm reduction.

0:00:58.2: I really like a harm reduction approach because it's more welcoming and open, some people are not ready to stop completely, but they still need support, and for those types of people, harm reduction is a great approach. So today, I'm gonna talk about five quick ways that you can implement harm reduction in your life to help you reduce the negative effects associated with your drug and alcohol use. So the first idea I have is to use a less powerful or less harmful route of administration or ROA when you're using your drugs. So route of administration refers to how you get the drugs inside your system, some routes of administration are eating or smoking or snorting or injecting, and depending on the drug you're using, different ROAs are gonna have a different negative effects on your system. So for example, if you're using cannabis and you're smoking a lot of it, it's gonna have a negative effect on your lungs, there's gonna be a lot of damage over time that's done to your lungs if you're smoking consistently.

0:02:03.5: So using a different ROA with cannabis might be ingesting edibles instead and eating your cannabis. So this way you're not quitting, but you're still reducing some of the negative effects that you're experiencing due to this drug. Another way to use ROA to reduce the harm is with more powerful drugs like heroin and cocaine, if you're injecting them, if you can switch to snorting or smoking, it's gonna have a lot less negative effect on your system. Injecting comes along with a lot of negative side effects, including risk of infection and overdose, whereas snorting and smoking are less risky ways to use the drugs.

0:02:45.8: So the next idea I have is to use a less powerful version of whatever substance you're using. So drug and alcohol comes in different strengths and different varieties, and depending on which you're using, you're gonna experience more or less negative effects associated with it. So a common example with this is with the alcohol, if you're struggling with your alcohol use, you're experiencing blackouts or negative health consequences, stay away from hard liquor. And instead, if you can drink beer or wine, which has a less powerful concentration, you're still gonna get the buzz, you're still gonna be able to engage in the substance that you like to engage with, but it's gonna have a lot less negative health effects on your system, and another idea I have is with cannabis, and it's kind of opposite from the ROA idea, but with cannabis, eating is often a lot more powerful than smoking. So if you're eating strong edibles and you're having trouble concentrating the next day or it's really throwing you off mentally, if you can instead smoke a small amount, it might reduce the harm by keeping the length of the cannabis effects shorter and keep you more sharp and more focused the next day.

0:04:02.0: So the next idea I have is a pretty common one, which is to put time restrictions on your use. A common rule that you hear a lot is "Don't drink before 5:00 PM." And that's a way to contain the use to a specific time of day. And as a result, it's gonna reduce the amount of use that you're engaging in. So another one is to only smoke weed on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday you can smoke, the rest of the week you don't allow yourself to smoke. Or you might come up with your own ideas of limiting the amount of days per week or having one day a week where you allow yourself to drink or whatever that might be for you. The important thing is that you have some sort of system or some sort of rule that you can rely on and stick to. If you're just using whatever you want to any day of the week, any hours of day, it's very easy to have a lot of negative effects due to the drug use, negative effects on your focus, on your health because you're using so much, and so finding a way to contain it to a specific time of day or a specific time a week can be helpful to reduce that effect.

0:05:08.9: So the next idea I have is to do some rehabilitation after you use your drugs. So oftentimes, using drugs and alcohol has some negative effect on your system, on your body and on your mental health, your physical health. So if you can do something good to offset something bad, it will help deal with the negative effects. So for example, if you have a heavy night of drinking, the next day, try eating really healthy and going on a run, doing some exercise. This is gonna be a positive effect on your mental health, on your physical health, and it's gonna help you offset some of the damage that you did. Another idea I have is that if you're feeling yourself getting kind of sick due to your drug use, take some supplements or some medicines, or again, eat really healthy to help support yourself. When you notice the negative effects of doing something good to help rehabilitate yourself, it's gonna decrease the amount of that negative effect compounds over time. So yeah, take care of yourself and do something good when you do something bad. So the last idea I have on harm reduction is to reset your tolerance, taking a tolerance break. When your tolerance starts to go up with drug and alcohol use, you might not feel the drug as much, you might not feel the effects as much, but it's still having that same negative effect on your physical health and if not your mental health as well.

0:06:32.6: So when your tolerance is really high, the pay off versus how much negative effect you're doing to yourself is a little out of balance. So if you can take a break every once in a while, take one week off per month, take a couple of days off, whenever you get a chance, this is gonna keep your tolerance from raising and raising, and it's gonna limit the amount of negative effects that that drug use is gonna have on your system. So yeah, those are some ideas I have on how to implement harm reduction in your life. I hope you found this helpful. I think the most important thing to do if you're experiencing negative effects from drug and alcohol are to, is to do something about it, get some support for yourself, set some system up in place.

0:07:14.2: I think that's the danger of the abstinence-based approach is that if you can't quit, you feel like, "Well, I'm not able to stop, so I might as well just use without any restrictions." So the harm reduction approach is a really good way to still try to work on these habits, still try to work on these behaviors, still try to reduce the negative effects, even if you're not able to quit completely. So yeah, try these ideas out in your life and see what happens, and I hope it's helpful. And if you have any questions or you need any support in these areas in your life, you're always welcome to reach out. I help people with drug and alcohol use all the time, as well as working with trauma healing and relationship and communication work. So that's it for today. I hope you found this helpful and take care. Bye.

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