Despite being a complex brain disease, there are plenty of physical factors that play a role in addiction.
Modern lifestyle pushes individuals to the limits, unbalancing the body, depleting the brain of essential neurotransmitters, and therefore possibly causing chemical deficits that may lead to depression, trouble sleeping and anxiety.
At Clinic Les Alpes we undertake tests in order to understand each individual’s requirements and deficiencies, which enables us to create a personalised programme of supplementation with vitamins, minerals, aminoacids and micronutrients.
Together with the medical team, our experienced dieticians will determine your micro nutritional profile.
Good nutrition and healthy food is easy to achieve, enjoyable and aids recovery and wellbeing.
Our goal is to help our patients learn new dietary habits and regain life balance. The skills and experience of our Executive Chef are exemplified in our balanced and nutritious menus. Each meal is a unique experience, created with fresh, local and seasonal products.
Together with the medical team, our experienced dieticians will determine your micro nutritional profile.
In assessing all aspects of your health and wellbeing, our dietician will review your eating and nutritional habits and, working with the Chef, will come up with a plan tailored to your needs. The aim is for you to develop good nutrition and eating habits which you can practice and then take with you into your life beyond treatment.
Good nutrition and healthy food is easy to achieve, enjoyable and aids recovery and wellbeing.
Our goal is to help our patients learn new dietary habits and regain life balance. The skills and experience of our Executive Chef are exemplified in our balanced and nutritious menus. Each meal is a unique experience, created with fresh, local and seasonal products.
Our medical and wellness spa comprises four treatment rooms, as well as male and female sauna, steam bath and relaxation suites, an indoor/outdoor infinity pool, an outdoor jacuzzi and a fitness space; a total of 1,000 square metres overlooking Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps.
Together with our Body Mind Source team, you will reawaken your senses and enter a journey of discovery, detoxification, relaxation and revitalisation. You will learn personalised strategies for creating balance, and optimise your energy, health and wellbeing.
Our therapists, all trained in the most reputed global institutes, will accompany you during your entire stay and help you purify your body and enhance your energy and wellbeing. All these body mediation techniques are closely supervised and assessed daily with the medical team to ensure the patient receives the best possible wellbeing experience.
Stress management is about balancing the demands we allow to be placed on us or that we place upon ourselves and our fitness to cope with those demands. Excessive demands threaten fitness. Inadequate fitness intensifies the demands.
Anyone who has become involved with addiction will be no stranger to stress. Addiction is stressful almost by definition.
The person with the addiction and the people relating closely to them will experience a great deal of stress – or strictly speaking, distress – in one way or another.
As indicated, addiction is inherently stressful from a psycho-emotional perspective because at its centre is the futile struggle to control the uncontrollable. On top of that is piled the stress placed directly on the body and brain by a variety of ingested chemicals and/or behaviors.
People who relate closely to colleagues, friends, and loved ones suffering from addiction will have a similar experience of stress because of the persistent collateral harm but also, in many cases, due to the way in which they relate to that person. So often the struggle to control the uncontrollable is played out in these relationships; the person standing in for the substance or behavior.
Harmful stress results from an unbalanced interplay between stressors and the capacity to cope with them. The stressors can be thought of as the demands placed upon the system and its resources, and the capacity is the degree of fitness that the system has to cope with those demands without breaking down.
The quantity and quality of demands must be considered. As demands increase and/or intensify, the capacity to deal with them can reduce, especially if fitness is neglected or abused.
If fitness decreases, the valence or weight of charge of the demands inevitably increases. This is why stress management requires attention to both sides of the scale. Reduce the quantity and intensity of the demands while increasing the fitness and therefore the capacity to cope with them.
Improving fitness requires a holistic approach that encompasses the well-being of the body, mind, and spirit. Demands include what is asked of you by others or by circumstances. They also include what you ask of yourself, which may be conscious and recognized or unconscious and perhaps with origin in early life.
Recovery from addiction involves working, preferably with support, on achieving a manageable balance between fitness and demands that begins with an honest personal reassessment of both.
The Serenity Prayer often recited by those who participate in the anonymous 12-Step fellowships may not have been written as such, but it is a naturally compelling stress management aid. The word God can be used or not as preferred.
(God) grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Its quiet recital can help in all manner of futile and debilitating struggles.
MBRP is a novel treatment approach developed at the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, for individuals in recovery from addictive behaviors.
The program is designed to bring practices of mindful awareness to individuals who have suffered from addictive tendencies. MBRP practices are intended to foster increased awareness of triggers, destructive patterns, and “automatic” reactions.
The mindfulness practices in MBRP are designed to help individuals pause, observe present experience, and bring awareness to the range of choices before acting in every moment. The program aims to help them learn to respond in ways that serve them, instead of reacting in ways that are detrimental. The goal is to work towards freedom from deeply ingrained and often very harmful habits.
Similar to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for depression, MBRP is designed as an aftercare program that integrates mindfulness practices and principles with cognitive-behavioral relapse prevention.
The primary goals of MBRP are:
The MBRP program is not in conflict with the 12-Step approach. There is more in common between the two approaches, like emphasizing acceptance, letting go, and the value attributed to meditation/prayer.
In addition, the MBRP approach incorporates elements of cognitive-behavioral relapse prevention, which focus on building the individual’s capacity to cope and increasing self-efficacy.
