Exercise Can Help You Quit Using Drugs & Tobacco Products
By Amy Sunshine
The health benefits of exercise extend beyond the direct results of the act of exercising itself. Regular exercise provides numerous and varied health benefits, including reduced risk of mortality and improved mental health. Beyond these broader benefits, exercise can assist with more specific health concerns such as recovery from chaotic substance use and quitting the use of tobacco products.
Exercise & Substance Use
I want to begin by noting that I firmly believe in a harm reduction framework and see mind-altering substances as neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Drugs can be fun and life-enhancing. They can also be destructive and lead to physical health problems and psychological distress. Different drugs have different safety profiles, different people have different relationships with any given mind-altering substance, and even drugs with greater potential risk can be used more safely.
Even extremely chaotic substance use can be a tool. We want to feel better, and drugs can help! However, this is frequently unsustainable. Not only can drugs negatively impact our relationships, health, and other aspects of our lives, but they often stop improving how we feel. This book by neuroscientist Judith Grisel is an accessible look at how using drugs can stop feeling great and start feeling awful as our brains fight to maintain an equilibrium.
Exercise is another tool that we can use to help manage difficult emotions and feel better, and we can learn to incorporate it into our lives in a way that is sustainable, enhances wellbeing, and is excellent for overall health.
For anybody who would like to quit using drugs or recover from the physical effects of past drug use, exercise can be extremely helpful.
Exercise & Quitting Drugs
Studies have shown that exercise can prove beneficial in both the process of quitting the use of drugs and in recovering from the effects of drug use. According to a study from the International Review of Neurobiology, “exercise training effectively prevents addiction formation, suppresses drug-seeking behaviors, and ceases addictions” and “improves both mental and cognitive deficits that commonly occur during drug withdrawal.”
These benefits relate to the same sorts of mood-elevating effects that make exercise so beneficial to mental health. In particular, exercise can stimulate the production and release of endorphins, hormones that can “act as natural mood boosters, reducing stress, anxiety, and depression often associated with substance use recovery.”
A review of epidemiological studies in Frontiers in Psychology offers three possible factors in how this relationship between exercise and substance use occurs:
Both exercise and substance use can stimulate similar neurochemical and hormonal reactions such that exercise can serve as an “alternative, non-drug reinforcer, or by producing functional neuroadaptations that influence an individual’s susceptibility to developing a substance use disorder.”
Exercise and drug use can have an inverse relationship in terms of both financial and time budgeting, such that money, time, and energy spent on exercise may replace money, time, and energy spent on drug use (and vice versa).
Both exercise and drug use could be behaviors that are influenced by some common, external factor “such as an underlying personality trait or an influence from the individual’s home environment.”
Essentially, both exercise and drug use can occupy similar spaces within a person’s behaviors, emotional desires, and neurochemical pathways such that an increase in one can result in a decrease of the other.
Another possible factor relates to the development of behavior patterns and the similarities between the sort of discipline and structured routines that can be helpful to both maintaining a regular exercise habit and maintaining abstinence from substances as a part of the recovery process from substance use. The effort to develop and maintain a regular exercise practice can provide a model for how to develop and maintain new habits related to cessation of substance use.
Exercise & Cigarettes
There is also evidence for a positive relationship between regular exercise and managing the challenges associated with quitting smoking and use of other tobacco products. According to a study available in the National Library of Medicine, “moderate-intensity exercise might help in reducing withdrawal symptoms and its adverse effects… [making] exercise is an effective adjunct treatment in a smoking cessation programme.”
The authors of the study largely attribute the benefits of exercise in reducing withdrawal symptoms from smoking cessation to exercise’s established positive effects on mood. They note that exercise seems to produce effects that “[help] smokers to cope with the withdrawal symptoms and hence, [facilitate] smoking cessation.” Another key observation was that participants’ “strong desire to smoke and the anticipation of negative effects were decreased following the exercise intervention, thus indicating a decrease in a negative mood.” Participants who engaged in exercise exhibited “a significant increase in positive wellbeing, decreased fatigue, and reduced physiological distress post-intervention in the mood subscales.”
Other investigations of this relationship have posited that the beneficial relationship between exercise and quitting smoking can be, in part attributed, to exercise serving to limit the weight gain that may be experienced during nicotine withdrawal. Other explanations include the suggestion that people who exercise have more energy and are more easily able to cope with stress, effectively reducing the need to experience those states as an effect of smoking.
Additionally, it is possible that the discipline and routines involved in maintaining a regular exercise practice can also effectively model the discipline necessary to quit smoking and replace the routines associated with being a regular nicotine user. This is a similar concept to the one posited above for recovery from drug use.
Exercise Is a Healthy Behavior That Can Support Other Healthy Behaviors
The common thread in all of the explanations for exercise’s beneficial effect on quitting tobacco and recovering from substance use is that the healthy aspects of regular exercise reinforce healthy behaviors and benefits in other ways. The health benefits of exercise can provide benefits that may make a person less reliant on drugs or tobacco for emotional uplift. The healthy behavior patterns that can be developed in a regular exercise practice can help a person develop similar healthy patterns relating to substance use and smoking.
Book an Appointment or Consultation Now
If you are interested in adding exercise to your toolbox, I can help you! I have been abstinent from alcohol for almost a decade, and working out has been a huge part of my journey. I also used exercise as a tool to quit nicotine. I would be honored to help you learn to love the gym like I have!
Whether you are working on cutting down on your use of drugs (including alcohol), want to quit entirely, or are already abstinent, working out can be enormously helpful. It can also be a greatly beneficial addition to your life if you would like to quit using nicotine.
To book a complimentary phone consult and discuss further, click here.
