May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. – Nelson Mandela
You are one of the few people in the world who is now equipped to manage your pain so it doesn’t keep ruining your life. On a planet of over 78 billion people, this is a small group at this point, but it’s expanding by the day as health professionals discover the potential of patients motivated to become self-managers of their pain, instead of the patients they used to be, seeking only to be cured of their pain or illness.
Discovering what we can do to reduce our pain was a shock to many of us. Yes, we’d already heard that not sleeping well causes a myriad of health problems, that stress is damaging, and that exercising is a must. It might have been startling, though, to learn that pain isn’t just a feeling but an experience we have some control over, how stress increases our sense of pain, and why some pain medications seem to put us on a roller coaster of fuzzy-brain-more-pain. When we learned how our thinking impacts pain, some of us were skeptical. But when we practiced observing and reframing our thoughts, we saw improvement in our pain levels‒even emotional stability‒we hadn’t expected. We gathered new tools for calming our nervous system‒humor, imagery, scents, and music. We learned to recognize behaviors that increase our pain‒lack of boundaries, anxiety, and anger; and we learned how self-compassion helps us heal, how to help our families cope with our pain, why cardiovascular exercise lowers our pain, and how pacing ourselves improves our productivity, not just our pain. We may have begun to view goal-setting as a friend instead of a taskmaster, and gained new appreciation for the sun’s role in our health and well-being. What are some of your biggest aha! moments and most effective pain-management tools?
How will you continue on this new path to physical and emotional health? If you’re afraid to “go it alone,” now is the time to create a game plan where you’re both the Coach and the Coached. Some people have the luxury of a personal coach. Most of us will have to figure out how to create an environment that supports and motivates us physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. If we don’t, we run the risk of slipping back into our previous habits and patterns where we weren’t thriving.
As you utilize your own pain-management strategies, you will encounter challenges and setbacks‒that’s life. Let’s look at a few things that can discourage or stall us and how we can use the skills we learned to stay on track:
Not setting ground rules with family and friends. This fits into the category of personal boundaries. It’s so easy to slip back into our previous lifestyles without realizing we run the risk of re-entering the environment we have worked to change. Have you asked your family not to pamper you or focus on activities you didn’t use to do? Since we teach others how to treat us, they will learn to respect our need for independence and self-reliance. Let them know you will ask when you need something.
Putting off something we want to improve. Most of us have put off starting an important project a time or two in our lifetime. More of us don’t have enough fingers to count them. And a few might ‘fess up to being a full-blown “procrastinator.” No matter. Procrastinating isn’t a label; it’s a symptom—usually of fear or a need to control something or someone we view as an authority (a boss, a parent, even ourselves). There are benefits to putting some things off: safety and avoiding knee-jerk actions. But mostly not getting started on something can signal to us our discomfort with the results or the process (boring, overwhelming), possible criticism from ourselves or someone else, or fear that what we start we won’t finish. What can we do to avoid this pattern? Neil Fiore says in his book, The Now Habit, that we don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or irrational. We “procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable we feel to criticism, failure, or our own perfectionism” (paraphrased). To help ourselves see these “put-offable” tasks or projects differently‒stop being harassed by guilt and have-to/should stress, feeling like a victim, and being in conflict with ourselves‒Fiore suggests that we rephrase the negatives that are stopping us into self-talk that doesn’t condemn or criticize:
- Replace I have to with I choose to.
- Replace I must finish with When can I start?
- Replace This project is so big and important… with I can take one small step now. • Replace I must do it perfectly with I can be perfectly human.
- Replace I don’t have time to play statements (I can’t because…I have to finish this project…I’m busy tonight…) with I must take time to play. Then, intentionally schedule your play and leisure time so the tasks you’ve been putting off have a stopping point and a reward built in to each day.
Negative self-talk. Those ANTS (automatic negative thoughts) that crawl into every unguarded moment are the most insidious pests! It takes persistent awareness to spot them and intentional extermination efforts to rid our headspace of them. But remember that extermination efforts are less effective than replacement efforts, because something has to live in there!
- Test the negatives for absolute truth
- Edit them to be more truthful
- Reframe the fact
For example,(1) My whole body hurts! (2) I hurt everywhere but my little pinky toe. (3) Pain is a gift, because without it I wouldn’t know how blessed that little toe is!
For many of us, managing our pain will be a lifelong endeavor. Let’s embrace what we can control and practice our pain-management life skills every day.
Coaching ourselves to live our best life possible empowers our personal strengths and motivates us to be what we envision.
