7 Benefits of a Sobriety Tracker

Staying sober can be extremely difficult. Even with treatment, a stay at a rehabilitation center and huge support system of friends and family, every day is a struggle – even good days, because one moment of weakness and your sober stint goes out the window. Meanwhile, accidents happen and if you’re recovering from opiates, but wind up in the hospital with a severe injury, you could be caught in between a rock and a hard place. Do you risk a full blown relapse to recover from the immediate pain? Or do you endure without?

There isn’t a right or wrong answer to that last example, the point is, staying sober isn’t simply a matter of “not buying drugs and alcohol”, it’s much more than that. Getting sober is a sprint, and staying sober is a marathon.

That said, in many ways, a sobriety tracker can help you recover from addiction and stay sober. It’s one piece of your support system that can help you on bad days, but even when you’re feeling good.

1. Track Your Progress

It can take 21-28 days to form a new habit, but as anyone whose tried to commit to a resolution or diet knows, day 3 can feel like it’s day 30. A sobriety counter helps track your real progress and that can be motivational in both ways.

First, you can see how far you’ve come and recognize the achievement. Recovery isn’t easy, and the first 30 days can be grueling with withdrawal symptoms and nigh unbearable cravings, but if you’re able to see you’re 7 days in and the withdrawal symptoms should be petering out, it can give you that much needed motivation to go the distance.

Conversely, your cravings can try to convince you that you’ve been sober for long enough that you can have a quick high and be completely fine. In this scenario, a sober tracker can help you see it’s only been 4 days and that’s just the self-preservation, irrational thought talking.

2. Your Own Resolution

Why do people make New Year’s Resolutions? It’s a loaded question. Many people make resolutions as a formality for the holiday. Yet the people who stick to their resolutions are those who are eager and willing to make a change in their lives. They see something they want to be different.

If that’s the case, why wait for the first of the year? Your sober tracker marks your first day sober and holds you to it. You don’t need to wait for an easy to remember date, your sobriety tracker does it for you. Then, in many ways, it’s establishing your own holiday; your own mark of achievement; something that is wholly yours.

3. Milestone Progress Bar

The I Am Sober app features a milestone progress bar to help keep you motivated. But why? How? Believe it or not, a progress bar helps increase your satisfaction and delight.

Addicts know all too well that their brains have been rewired for instant gratification as opposed to long term planning. Without a progress bar, the idea that your next milestone is 10 days away would be a Herculean feat. What a progress bar does is offer a short-term reward toward the long term goal. The progress bar can help you see where you’re going and reinforce (to yourself) that you’re getting closer to achieving something daily.

4. Sobriety Calculator

Have you ever made a misestimation about your paycheck? Say, at your first job, have you ever anticipated how much you’ll have by the end of the month only to be disappointed? But then, when your next paycheck rolls around, you realize you’re in great shape because you’re on the pay cycle and that paycheck was a full two weeks.

A sober calculator works like that. If you spent $7/day on your drug of choice, that doesn’t seem like much. That’s only $49/week, but at the end of a month, that’s over $200. That’s money that can go to utilities, internet, or groceries. In effect, when you’ve managed to do is increase your income. It may not be clear at first, but that’s what a sobriety calculator is helpful for, keeping track of your savings.

5. Keep A Record

It’s important to keep a record of your sobriety, not just because it’ll help you visualize the long term goals, but also because it helps you to see where you were and your accomplishments. In this way, a social app (such as a sober tracker) can help document your journey.

Listing things you’re grateful for every night will help ward off cravings for immediate gratification. More than that though, if you’re having a particularly bad day and thinking of relapsing, you can revisit your old journal entries. This’ll either make you realize some days were harder or you’ll not want to let your previous past self down.

6. Keep Your Friends Informed

Speaking of social apps, a sober counter is a perfect ice breaker for friends to jump on board and support you. Typically, your real friends want to help, but they don’t know how to start or what to say. However, if you start sharing you milestones and days sober, then you’re opening up others to talk to you about it and you can feel proud publicly.

7. Connect Within The Recovery Community

Friends and family are great and essential to any support system, but if they don’t suffer from addiction, then they may not have the empathy you’re looking for. Addiction is like being pushed into the mud, it’s not your fault you’re facedown in it, but you’ve got to pick yourself back up – a lot of non-addicts don’t understand this.

Regardless, with a sobriety tracker, you can share your story but also witness others’. Read their story, comment on it. Just because you’re having a good day doesn’t mean someone, somewhere isn’t having a bad day. Reading how they handle it may help you in the future, but even just connecting with people who are familiar is a blessing.

Download the I Am Sober App today, it’s free and can help you build that multi-faceted support group you need to stay sober.