Try Gardening to Support Your Addiction Recovery

So you're in recovery now. That's a real change, and if you keep taking healthy steps, it's the kind of change that carries you a long way. Maybe you already have a personal development plan, or maybe you're still piecing one together. Either way, your belief in yourself can grow a little more with each passing day. And if you want to give your recovery every advantage, here's an idea that might sound odd at first: gardening.

Yes, gardening. Stay with me for a minute. It's a whole-person activity you can lean on while you rebuild your life, and it turns out there are quite a few ways it helps. So let's go through them.

Start with mental health in general. Plenty of people lose hours in the garden and genuinely love it, and when researchers looked closer, they found that time spent outdoors with your hands in the soil lifts mood and happiness. Part of the reason is that the brain releases more neurotrophins when you do it. For someone in recovery, that kind of boost matters. It can ease stress, put a smile on your face more often, and even improve how you connect with the people around you. Your sobriety leans heavily on staying mentally well, so anything that keeps you going at the pace you're on now is worth your attention.

Then there's stress. Gardening can lower the cortisol in your brain, and lower cortisol means less of the tension you've been carrying. When you're out there with a task in front of you, your attention narrows to what your hands are doing. Everything else gets quieter for a while. That's how the stress drains off. And stress can be genuinely crippling if you let it sit. You can work past it in all sorts of ways, and it's smart to write down exactly how you plan to do that in your development plan. If you've never dug around in a garden before, give it a shot. You might find it's your small escape, and your mood lightens while you're at it.

Depression is the other big one. If you live with it, you're in the company of millions of people worldwide, and this is not a fight you're destined to lose. There are things that help, and gardening is one of them. You're tending something. You're growing something. You're making something new appear where there was nothing, and that can feel wonderful. It nudges your self-esteem up and takes some of the weight off.

Depression often pulls a person toward isolation. You might stop wanting to do the things you used to love, and that can be frightening. But you can come out the other side. Spend some time in the dirt. A lot of people have found it carries them through the hard stretches and back toward the good ones.

Recovery gets confusing. There will be days you're not sure what you're doing, and that's normal, you just need a little guidance to keep moving. Gardening offers a lot, and the benefits are yours to collect if you decide to. One caveat worth holding onto: holistic practices only pay off if you actually believe they can work for you. Keep trying new things and you'll see returns in the short run and the long run both.

Many people in recovery have turned to gardening to loosen the grip of stress and depression. If those are part of your own recovery, you can get past them. Figure out what belongs in your personal development plan. Gardening might just be it.

- Cara Gilmore