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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
Someone else's list of alternatives will not hold, because they thought of theirs and you did not. Build yours slowly, adding what has genuinely worked once or twice, and let it stay short and unglamorous. If you are helping somebody, resist handing them a ready made version: your job is the conditions in which they can make their own.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause (Quran 29:69). The striving comes first in that sentence, and what looks like the answer usually arrives afterwards.
العنكبوت
وَٱلَّذِينَ جَٰهَدُواْ فِينَا لَنَهۡدِيَنَّهُمۡ سُبُلَنَاۚ وَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَمَعَ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
But We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause: God is with those who do good
Qur’an 29:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of skills training offered on its own for substance use disorder found it feasible and acceptable, while the evidence for how much it achieves stayed limited and preliminary. So the techniques are not doing the work by themselves. That fits the ordinary observation that what surrounds the tool, time and trust and practice, is a good part of why it works.
Warner N, Murphy M. (2022). Dialectical behaviour therapy skills training for individuals with substance use disorder: A systematic review.. Drug and alcohol review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A tool only holds when the thinking behind it already belongs to the person using it.
If stopping has been harder for you than it seems to be for other people, that is worth taking seriously rather than reading as a flaw in your character.
Distant health warnings move almost nobody. The cost that lands is the one showing up this month: your memory, your marks, the work you know you could be doing.
With vaping the pull is often not the hit at all. It is knowing the thing is there in your pocket if you need it.