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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.

PDF 06/05/2024

Staying On My Track Worksheet