Sober House: Weekly Schedule & Rules

Hey, Cadre people, happy Sunday. Chris Edrington here again. We're going to talk a little bit more in this series about the structure of sober living recovery residences. This specific question that I received this week was what does a daily schedule look like when you live in a sober house? What kind of rules are there? So the schedule and the rules, and I'm going to give you some awareness of what those things are typically, but more importantly, kind of the why behind it. So from a general perspective, what I believe very strongly about those early months in recovery, in sober living, when you have this opportunity to really do some work on repurposing your life, the schedule you keep, what you do with your time, matters immensely in how quickly you get better and the quality of your recovery.

Everything gets better if your routine makes sense. And I will explain a little bit more in detail about how that works. So in early recovery, in the first year, especially in the first year, I'm going to sort of put it this way. It matters way more where your a** is and where your head is. And by that, I mean, where can you put yourself in your weekly schedule that will give you the most return on investment? Okay. So when I do a lecture sometimes at treatment centers or wherever, I often write up on a whiteboard, this is you and your recovery sober house, or your recovery house or wherever you're living in early recovery.

And these are all the little things that you do every week, right? Meetings, meetings, meetings, friends, job, gym, my aunt's house for dinner, my parents house, the coffee shop. And you and I draw this little diagram of all the different places you go, and you could literally map out all seven days after having done it and say, yeah, went here, went here, went here, and I spent this much time doing these things. And during that time, did I get any benefit from that in terms of camaraderie or friendship or working out or what was the return?

And I think in recovery, when I'm talking about, specifically about where you can get ROI on your recovery capital, like, how can I invest in my recovery? If you were to rate all of those places that you spend time during the week and say, this is a one, this is a two, this one's a six, get rid of all the three and belows, change them, go to different meetings, go to a different kind of gym, don't see your friends from treatment who aren't staying sober. So we got to lose the threes and fours even below, and we got to demand for ourselves that it's, say, five or six or higher.

So this is the proactive approach to that. You can create that schedule yourself. You can call other people in recovery, call your friend from treatment, set up coffee, meetings, set up lunches, set up. Hey, I'll go to this meeting with you on Tuesday. You go to this one with me on Wednesday. I'll drive on Tuesdays. You drive on Wednesdays. If you set up these things in your early routine of the sober house, sober living structure of your life, you're sort of everyday, every day of the week figured out.

That is an incredible investment in your recovery. Because what happens is you're in the conversation so often, you're exposed to people who are doing well. You see people who are, like, better and feeling happy, and things are working out, and it's attractive. Like, hey, man, I want that right. You also see people who don't do well. If you go to a lot of meetings, you hear about people who overdosed or relapsed, sad stories, they still affect us. So what I want to stress is that you've got to get out there and put yourself.

It's almost like you take this chair and you carry it around with you after treatment, and you don't set it down until you found the most productive place to put it. On the couch in front of the tv, not so great. You cannot sit on the couch in early recovery and think the s*** out of yourself and get better, although a lot of us try in the beginning. So the structure of the sober house, if it's run well, promotes that right? Kind of the way they might do it, is say, hey, we encourage you to be out of the house between ten and three.

And that's an empty rule. If it isn't followed up with, here's some things you could be doing right. I'm a big believer in, when I talk to my sponsors or people that I work with in early recovery, the first thing I ask them is, who do you know in the community? Give me your top three people. Give me your top three girlfriends, your top three boyfriends that you hang out with, that you met in treatment, you met in AA, and do you have their numbers in your phone? And if I said to you, what if you called all three of those people and you said, I really want to invest more in my weekly recovery, my routine recovery capital.

I want to build some more capital. Will you guys do this with me by agreeing to this breakfast on the first Sunday of the month, this meeting on Tuesdays, this one on Wednesdays, this one on Thursdays. Let's all get together and play basketball on Saturdays, whatever you can build together. And I guarantee if you reached out to those people, they would say, like, man, I need that. I really need that. That's how you build a routine that serves you right. So kind of have to start with AA because that's where the people are and you can meet them.

If we switch gears a little bit to the rules of the sober house, if it's run well, the rules, like I said earlier, will promote that kind of engagement. You have to be home in a certain curfew. You can't have random people spend the night in the house. You can't spend a bunch of nights out of the house and not tell anyone where you are. So here's an example of what I used to tell guys in my house. If you, this particular house is a big, giant three story house. And I said, this is what I want you guys to start to think about.

Say you're in the house, you're on the first floor, or you're on the second floor and you're getting ready to go somewhere and you get your jacket on, you're all ready to go, and you know that one of your roommates is upstairs and maybe he's the only other person home. Or she go up there and say, hey, man, just wanted you to know I'm going to do this, this, and this, and I'll be back around eight. In that one instance, you have done some really important things in that sober house. One, you set yourself up for some accountability, because if you don't come home, people kind of remember what you said when you left, like, where you might be.

Two, you showed that other person in the house that you give a s*** what they think, which is big. Really big. And more than that, you've acknowledged that in early recovery, it's important to have that transparency, even to go above and beyond. In other words, not that we're sneaking out and not telling people where we're going, which is the life we used to live, but really the antithesis of that, because that's the old life. So by overdoing the new life a little bit, by being a little bit overly transparent or a little bit overly sort of clear with everyone what you're doing, we're going to end up at a really balanced point at some point after that.

Super helpful. Super. I really encourage people to understand what that means. So when you're looking at a sober house and you want to know what it's going to be like to live there, talk to people, talk to the manager, I would ask questions about are the residents required to do things together? Are they encouraged to do things together? Does the house have a kitchen set up such that a bunch of people could do a meal together? Does the house meeting happen at a time in the week when we could all do something afterwards?

Because we're already together? We already arranged our schedules to have this house meeting at a certain time, which is what we do in my house is we arrange it at a certain time. We know that you're going to be there. We know that you don't have anything generally immediately after or before. So sometimes we plan activities as a group around that time. So the rules and the structure and the schedule is important. And I encourage anybody who's moms, dads, brother, sister, or if you the person who's looking for a sober house, call them up, look at their website, ask them questions.

Ask questions about this kind of stuff. Because if all you hear from the sober house is how nice the wallpaper is or how nice the furniture is, or there's a swimming pool or a hot tub, you're not picking a Hilton. You're picking a sober house. So a lot more to learn about this topic, I've got two more with two questions each. Two more. Two more sections of this with two questions each. I'm going to answer in future videos. Hope everybody's having a great Sunday.