THE PAIN PERSPECTIVE: Four Vital Mindset Shifts for Managing Your Chronic Pain
A life of chronic pain is accompanied by a number of difficult emotions: feelings of loss, anger, fear, sadness, to name a few - so much of the time our physical pain is matched by emotional pain. It can consume your life if you let it.
Focusing only on negative thoughts, or pushing them away altogether, can increase both our intensity of pain and our perception of pain - our pain mindset can actually make us hurt more! Thankfully there are mindset shifts we can make that help us to take charge and regain control of our pain and our life.
Increasingly, research shows that leaning into our emotions can be good for our health and, conversely, keeping them pushed down and locked away can actually worsen the ‘negative’ ones. It takes courage to move towards emotional pain but if we don’t shy away from it and allow ourselves to truly feel our feelings, all of them, surprisingly we can reap rewards of a more peaceful, and happier existence.
Here I briefly outline four pain-mindset-shift strategies.
SWEET DREAMS: Five Things That Might Just Transform Your Sleep Game
Sleep is something of a rare and precious commodity when you live with chronic pain. Pain, and the anxiety and stress that often accompanies it, is a killer when it comes to getting enough sleep, and not getting our full quota of restorative rest affects our mind and body in ways that carry over into our daily life - not only does it make it more difficult to manage our pain, lack of sleep can actually increase our pain. It impacts every aspect of our life — our physical and mental health, our work, our confidence, and our relationships. The opposite is also true - when we get our sleep back, we often get our life back too. Sleep can transform our wellbeing.
DEEP MIDWINTER: Six Vital Lessons Your Garden Can Teach You About Real Rest
In the short, dark days of winter, while the natural world instinctively surrenders to deep rest, we, instead of allowing ourselves to move in harmony with this rhythm, direct our energies outwards instead of inwards.
Seasonal living, requires us, as women, to reconnect to our cyclical nature, which can be difficult in this linear world that holds productivity in such high esteem. And to do so, we need to accept that rest is an vital nutrient, not a weakness. To remember that rest is written in our DNA.
‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE CHILLED: The 12 (Pain-Saving) Days of Christmas
What happens when all those good intentions you had to shop early, wrap gifts as you bought them, practice self-care throughout December, and cook ahead and freeze, kind of disappeared along the Advent way because, well, a life of pain got in the way? Suddenly we are halfway through the countdown to Christmas Day and you still haven’t finished your gift shopping, your cards haven’t been posted, you haven’t a clue what you are cooking for Christmas dinner and you haven’t got one festive item in the cupboards - is it too late to have a stress-free yuletide celebration?
The good news is that you can start where you are - no matter how much or little you have already prepared it is possible to achieve this in twelve easy, actionable steps - the 12 (Pain-Saving) Days of Christmas.
SILENT NIGHT: Five Sleep Myths That Could Disrupt Your Festive Rest
Sleep is a vital weapon in the fight against pain, but it can be a struggle to get enough of it - pain leads to difficulty sleeping, and lack of sleep makes pain worse so it can become a cruel loop of sleeplessness and pain. A poor night’s sleep will leave us feeling not only tired and irritable but will also have long-term effects on our health. And worse still, not only does sleep deprivation increase our risk of developing health issues, it also reduces our body’s ability to cope with them. Pain can feel a lot worse after a sleepless night, which in turn can lead to raised stress levels and then we are caught in that old ‘pain - overwhelm - stress - more pain’ cycle.
So what steps can we take to limit the havoc that the festive season will most definitely inflict on our sleep?