Residential rehab centers can provide many benefits over outpatient addiction treatment. They limit patients’ access to drugs and alcohol, they allow addicts to live in a new environment away from the daily stresses and triggers to use at home, and they provide a supportive community of people who are all going through the same things at the same time.

An additional benefit of choosing a residential treatment center that most people probably wouldn’t think of is the opportunity to change your sleeping patterns.Most addicts do not have very good sleep habits. They usually involves staying awake until the wee hours of the morning and sleeping all day. That is, if they have a regular sleep pattern at all. Alcohol and all virtually all drugs have some type of effect on sleep, but certain drugs including crystal meth, allow users to stay awake for a very long period of time and then “crash”. Changing this is very difficult for an individual to do on their own without an outside force strongly encouraging it.

Residential drug rehab centers have strict guidelines for sleeping patterns. There may not be actual rules about when you have to be asleep, but you will be required to attend meetings in the mornings and exercise. You will have to eat meals when they are being served, or you will simply miss out. Trying to stay up late and fight against the schedule of the treatment center is more trouble than it’s worth.

A regular sleep schedule makes people more healthy, which is always beneficial in addiction recovery. It makes them less likely to relapse if they’re not up in the middle of the night with nothing to do except drink alcohol or use drugs. It keeps recovering addicts away from friends who might be a bad influence at night and helps them maintain a stable lifestyle with a job.