Staying on My Track worksheet
Tool Overview
- What made you want to change ?
- Why is staying on track important ?
- What changes have you noticed since you started staying on track?
- If you keep working to stay on track, what does your life look like?
- How have these changes affected your life? Your family?
- How do you feel about what your life could be?
- What will your life look like if you keep working to stay on track?
- What can you do to keep staying on track ?
When To Use This Tool
Once you’ve found the motivation to make a change and stay on track, you usually need strategies to cope with urges and cravings.
An urge is the (often overwhelming) impulse to engage in a behavior. It is the feeling of ‘I have to have it now,’ which can make it difficult to stick to your goals. Physical withdrawal from a substance, such as alcohol, nicotine or heroin, can also be accompanied by psychological withdrawal from behaviors such as gambling, obsessive relationships or overeating.
A craving is similar to an urge but is defined as a very strong desire.
Even some time after learning to take control of a behavior, many people can still experience urges and cravings. This is a very normal part of changing behavior and should be expected.
The SMART program focuses on helping you manage your responses to urges and cravings because these are powerful triggers.
How To Use This Tool
Back on Track group discussion
During the yarning circle, is where you’ll have an opportunity to talk about urges and cravings. Once you have a better understanding about your experience with urges and cravings, you can develop your own coping strategies to help deal with them. There may be an opportunity to take suggestions from the group or even be able to share ideas with others.
Remember that:
- Urges are time limited
- Urges often arrive at particular times and in particular situations - in other words, they have a recognisable or predictable trigger.
- If you understand urges, you can be less driven by them. It can also help in avoiding potential triggers. Sometimes, just by taking notice of behavior, it begins to change.
Example Scenarios
Key facts about urges and cravings:
Just because we experience an urge or craving, we don’t have to act on it. We may think that the only way to get rid of an urge or craving is to engage in an old behavior. SMART seeks to teach participants to accept urges and cravings without giving in to them, by using a number of different tools.
There are times where you may find urges and cravings harder to resist such as parties, Sorry Business, celebration events and football carnivals- those times when you would normally use or engage with the substance you’re hoping to change.
Helpful Links
Related Tools
View all- Tool
Lifestyle Audit
When we slow down on a behaviour of concern, it can leave a gaping hole in our lives. Often, we find that we have a lot more free time, which used to be filled with activities related to our old behaviour. Also, we may no longer associate with the same group of friends.
- Tool
Setting SMART Goals
It’s important to make sure goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed.
- Tool
Weekly Planner
Once you have set some specific goals and broken them down into smaller, specific steps, the weekly planner can be useful for keeping these goals on track and ensuring that you are taking active steps towards achieving them.
Tool Overview
The ABC Model is a good way of understanding how we can help change our feelings and behaviour by challenging our thinking.
When to Use This Tool
The ABC Model is a good way of understanding how we can help change our feelings and behaviour by challenging our thinking. It helps us uncover beliefs that are not helping us /contributing to the behaviour we are trying to change.
This exercise may be done in the group setting but can also be very useful for participants to look at between meetings.
How To Use This Tool
When working with urges: To analyze a lapse/relapse or to develop coping statements for an anticipated lapse/relapse.
In the event of a lapse, the question to ask is not “What made me do that”, but rather, “How did I talk myself into it?” It is not the urge (A) that causes the lapse (C). It is our beliefs (B); our irrational self-talk.With emotional upset:
The ABC Model can also be used to work with emotional upset or frustrations that may occur at any point in the recovery journey. The ABCs allow us to discover our unhelpful beliefs which contribute to emotional upsets. Disputing helps us eliminate our irrational thinking so we can both feel better and do better. In SMART Recovery we teach that we feel the way we think; it’s not unpleasant events that disturb us, it’s the way we think of them. By changing our thinking, we change how we feel.Identifying and Disputing Unhelpful Thinking.
Disputing is a process of challenging the way we think about situations. It’s about trying to look at thoughts more accurately. Disputing unhelpful thinking can help us make more informed decisions about thoughts instead of just acting on them. Balanced thinking leads to effective new beliefs.
