How Addiction Impact Work And Work Impacts Recovery

Addiction can have an effect on nearly every portion of your life. It’s not just about your health or your actions. Addiction can destroy lives, relationships, marriages, and families. Addiction can also cause you to lose your job and your livelihood.

Even though, initially, your addiction can have a huge impact on work and your career, once you are in recovery your career can have a positive impact on your process of beating drugs. Work can be the thing that keeps you busy and keeps your mind off of that addiction that will still be nagging at you in the back of your head.

Your Actions At Work

When you are an addict it’s possible your addiction with affect your work. Not all addicts will have an issue between addiction and career, but if you do it could lose you your job. Without a job you could lose your home, and a continuing downward spiral could unfold.

Just like at home, drugs and alcohol can make you have a shorter temper when you are at work. This means you could snap at the boss, go off on an employee, or any number of other terrible scenarios. And if you go to work drunk or high you could get in an accident and harm or kill yourself, or someone else.

If your addiction has been affecting your work, this is one sign that you really should get some help immediately. The sooner you realize there is a problem the better chance you’ll have at not losing your job. And, the sooner you get into recovery the sooner you can get back to work.

Work During Recovery

After you have successfully made it through rehab, it becomes time to get back to life. While some things, like those that may have had a hand in your addiction in the first place, may be things you no longer want to do again, there are still some things that you will want to find normalcy in again, like work.

If you were lucky enough to not lose your job because of your addiction, getting back to work can be one way to stay on the road to recovery, as long as the new job isn’t stressful and has a zero tolerance policy on alcohol and drugs. These places will often complete drug screenings for new hires such as can be found from this resource. If a company doesn’t have a zero tolerance policy, then you should look for new work.

Work and addiction are not good bedfellows, but you don’t need to lose your job over your addiction. Talk to your boss, find out about time off for rehab. If you are willing to get clean and honest with your employer, and haven’t made any mistakes at work, it’s pretty likely they’ll work with you. Honesty is the best policy, and your job could be your savior after rehab.