There are many metaphors and idioms used in life. When someone is suffering from financial hardship, social issues, or substance addiction, they often use the term “rock bottom” to describe the worst situation or condition that they can experience.
While hitting “rock bottom” of course carries a very negative connotation, it can also signify that things can only get better from here for some people.
However, the myth of hitting rock bottom can be harmful when it comes to drug and alcohol addiction recovery, because it may encourage people to wait until they’ve hit their subjective rock bottom before actually seeking help.
Instead, it’s important to understand that “rock bottom” is a subjective and completely unreliable metric or assessment of someone’s condition.
When it comes to addiction, not only is it possible for your condition to continually worsen – until disease, illnesses, or death – but it’s important to seek professional intervention as early as possible to optimise your recovery.
“Rock bottom” in addiction often refers to when someone has reached a new “low”.
This “low” will come in different forms to different people, whether it means doing something embarrassing in public, consuming more alcohol or drugs than you ever have before, experiencing the worst hangover of your life, and so on.
Ultimately, it’s a subjective way that someone measures the condition of their addiction.
As a subjective way to measure the condition of someone’s addiction, the phrase rock bottom is both unreliable and harmful.
While movies, tv shows, and other forms of media may reinforce that a character or a celebrity hit “rock bottom” before recovering, it perpetuates a harmful misconception that you can only recover from addiction once you’ve hit a significantly bad chapter or situation.
Waiting to hit rock bottom while suffering from addiction is dangerous because rock bottom doesn’t exist.
In the process of waiting for rock bottom, your health could deteriorate and your addiction severity worsen indefinitely.
Before you know it, addiction can be a bottomless pit until you experience irreversible health effects and life-changing consequences.
When you leave an addition untreated for too long, you’ll experience a range of issues, including but not limited to:
Ultimately, the longer that you leave an addiction untreated, the worse that the level of dependence will become.
Addiction and dependence forms when we have engaged in addictive substances so much that it has changed our neural pathways or reward pathways in the brain.
As a result, your brain has become accustomed to having these substances present in your system most of the time, and it almost feels worse (temporarily) without it.
Continuing these habits, even if you decide to scale back your drinking or drug consumption, will continue to amplify your dependence because it leads to a longer timeline where you are dependent on these substances to function.
Since our neural pathways and reward pathways are adaptable, we are able to optimise our chances of addiction recovery by seeking help earlier.
The less these neural pathways are manipulated in a way which becomes physically and psychologically dependent on substances, the sooner we can overcome addiction.
In very simple terms, the less intense and less time spent suffering from addiction, the easier it is to recover.
The longer you spend suffering from an addiction, the more your brain is wired to suffer from compulsive thoughts and perform addiction-related habits.
It’s important to understand that addiction isn’t a linear journey.
When researching addiction recovery stories, or enacting your own recovery journey, you’ll find that people suffer from ups and downs. While someone may go a full year without alcohol, they may relapse on the 366th day.
Ultimately, motivation fluctuates, we experience psychological battles, relationship stress, deaths in the family, and much more that can compromise our sobriety.
It’s important to remember that relapsing is not only common but expected in someone’s recovery journey.
Some people like to coin a spontaneous relapse as a “slip” rather than a full relapse where your entire recovery lifestyle is abandoned. What matters is how you bounce back from that “slip”.
Addiction is a lifelong process, and it can never be achieved in one day. Even if you’ve undergone detox or learned the best coping mechanisms at a drug and alcohol rehab, you still need to maintain your lifestyle of sobriety.
You might find a week goes by where you can easily avoid alcohol. But one stressful day can challenge your recovery. Because of these myriad factors in life, recovery is never linear.
Here are the many benefits of early intervention:
If you are concerned that you are suffering from an addiction, that is enough of a reason to seek treatment.
Addiction is an issue that needs to be tackled as early as possible to prevent it from intensifying. Whatever your current condition, addiction can never be too big or too small to consider recovery.
It’s important that you seek professional diagnosis from a medical practitioner when screening for addiction.
However, it’s also important to understand that many people may turn a blind eye or convince themselves that they aren’t suffering from addiction. Additionally, they may avoid seeking a diagnosis to avoid confirming their fears.
If you want to gain more insight on the condition of your addiction without seeking a professional, you can take the CAGE questionnaire to gain more insight:
Should the person answer “yes” to two or more questions, it indicates that they are suffering from an addiction.
Alternatively, people can use the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), which is a more comprehensive substance addiction screening tool.
Family members can play a monumental role in someone’s addiction recovery. Here’s how they can optimise their loved one’s recovery journey:
Rehab 4 Addiction can support family members and addicted people by offering helpline support and providing a free referral service to drug and alcohol rehab facilities across the United Kingdom and beyond.
By dialling the number 0800 140 4690 or +44 345 222 3508 internationally, you’ll come into contact with a friendly and experienced team member at Rehab 4 Addiction who can answer any questions that you may have about the recovery journey.
Whether you require simple guidance, a detox process, outpatient treatment, or treatment at a residential rehab, reach out today and initiate your path towards recovery.
Boris is our editor-in-chief at Rehab 4 Addiction. Boris is an addiction expert with more than 20 years in the field. His expertise covers a broad of topics relating to addiction, rehab and recovery. Boris is an addiction therapist and assists in the alcohol detox and rehab process. Boris has been featured on a variety of websites, including the BBC, Verywell Mind and Healthline. You can connect with Boris online at LinkedIn or X.com.
