Wellness During the Holidays

Happy Holidays everyone! We hope you enjoyed your December as much as we did here at Foundry Treatment Center Steamboat Springs! While ourWellness Activities looked slightly different this year due to COVID restrictions, that didn’t stop us from getting a little CREATIVE here on campus.

Healthy Habits

This month during Healthy Habits group, we put a special emphasis on Self-Care. Do you know what self-care is? Self-Care is defined as deliberately taking care of yourself through restorative activities. Some examples of self-care are writing in a journal, meditating, volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you, working in the garden, playing a game, reading a book, exercising, being out in nature, getting creative and connecting with friends.What do you like to do for self-care?

The Holiday season can be especially stressful, so we make extra effort to help our participants cultivate their own individual self-care plan as well as develop coping skills through self-care to help them navigate their triggers. For our participants who are about to transition to a sober living or aftercare program, we help them work through their emergency self-care plan, which lists specific activities they will use as daily self-care, while also identifying their top three positive coping strategies. In addition, they will write out their top five emergency self-care practices. This could include the name and number of their sponsor, meditation, being out in nature, box breathing or other coping skills. We also ask them to list 5 practices, people or places toAVOID in times of crisis or stress to use as a helpful reminder to keep them on track. When they have completed this emergency self-care plan, we encourage them to keep it either on their person, or in a place where they can see it every day, to get in the practice of utilizing their tools and skills!

Do you have your own Self-Care plan?

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December Wellness Activities

With the lack of snow here in the Yampa Valley for most ofDecember, in addition to the COVID restrictions in Routt County, we had to get a bit creative for our wellness activities this year, which just made them all the more fun!

We got into the holiday spirit by decorating a Christmas tree and doing our own version of the Great British Bake Off! Participants were split in to two different teams and were given intentionally vague recipes to make either Grandma’s Chocolate Bread or Cinnamon Swirl Cheesecake and were only given 2 hours to complete their desserts. Participants had to use problem solving and team work to figure out how to successfully make their recipe.Let’s just say the results were interesting…. but undeniably delicious! During the Christmas week we had an in-house Gingerbread House building contest! Which one is your favorite?

A new opportunity we were able take advantage of this month was having our own private rock-climbing film festival premier, complete with popcorn machine and concession stand! Our gym is the perfect place to inflate our GIANT inflatable movie screen for special occasions like this! One of the positive things to come out of COVID is how much more accessible things have become virtually. In a ‘normal’ year, a ski film or a rock-climbing premier would be in a theater and is typically not a sober event, but, due to COVID and films moving virtually, we were able to provide a safe and sober space for our residents to enjoy these films!

Fitness and Yoga!

Speaking of virtual, we were able to maintain a normal yoga and fitness schedule for our participants with the help of Zoom! During the restrictions we had a hybrid model where our yoga instructors would Zoom in to teach yoga, and in person fitness instruction was provided. Our goal for fitness and yoga is to educate and lay the foundation of exercise and yoga for participants to carry into their recovery!

Below is one of the workouts we did the week of Christmas.To do this work out, you do it like the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”You start at one, then you do 2, then 1. Then 3, then 2, then 1 and so on until you have done all 12 days of Christmas!

12 days of Christmas Workout:

1 plank for 20 sec

2 Burpees

3 Push ups

4 Bicycle Crunches

5 Squats

6 Tricep Dips

7 Boxing Punches

8 Mountain Climbers

9 Jumping Jacks

10 Alternating Lunges

11 Crunches

12 High knees

That was our Wellness for December in a nutshell! We hope you have a safe and happy holiday, and we can’t wait to share all of the funWellness things we have in store for January 2021!

Cait Mowris, Wellness Director, Foundry Steamboat

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