Chronic Ilness Coping

Navigating Daylight Savings Time

March 7, 2024

Published by hesselaine@gmail.com on June 24, 2024

Living with a chronic health condition or chronic pain is no joke. Trust me, I’ve been there. Click on the video below to hear how I’ve handled the frustrating elements of living with a chronic symptom myself, and a quick tip that you can use today to improve your ability to manage your health and well-being.

Hey, what’s up everyone? I’m going to tell you a quick story about some thing from my life to help explain a concept that comes up when we’re talking about coping with chronic illness or chronic pain.

So I talked about how our thinking and the way that we move through our world interpreting what’s happening in our body can really influence what we actually feel in our body. And this is pretty transformative because you know we often think because this is the way the medical system has the only way we can improve our symptoms or pain is by biological medical interventions.

But that’s only part of the story. If you think about the biopsychosocial approach to treating chronic health conditions or pain, there are two elements that are not included. There’s a social element and the psychological element not included if you just focus on the biological element what’s happening in your body.

And this has shown up for me in my life. So I’ve got this kind of chronic injury that results in chronic pain paresthesia in my hand. I’ve done all the medical work up to really ensure that there is not anything kind of damaged in my body that could be causing the sensations. And I’ve pretty much rehabbed my body to extent that I will and it’s just this thing that I’ve got live and waxes some days are better than others.

thing that I do in my hand mostly go to sleep and this is pretty obvious like your brain finally winds down from the day you’re able to actually kind of settle your mind enough to feel the sensation of your body and so I feel these paresthesia in my hand are kind of neuropathic numbing tingling feeling in my hands. I feel the most when I lie down to go sleep.

Well this is a problem when you were trying to go to sleep sleep and all of a sudden you’re focusing on the sensations in your body and cause insomnia, a massive issue one of the things I’ve become reliant on is a heating pad and what the heating pad does is just create a competing signal that I think dulls the sensation of the pain enough where I’m not thinking about the sensation and can fall asleep. The problem is I will then wake up after about an hour of being on the heating pad because I’m hot and so now I’ve got this sort of dependency for lack of a better word on this heating pad to fall asleep every night because it does in my hands it is causing more problems.

And so one of the things I’ve been experimenting with lately is talking to myself differently. So in the past, I’ve gotten really upset when I felt numb terrible thing oh, it’s this is awful. What’s happening in my body can I fix it? Can I make better sort of alarmist beliefs that rev up my nervous system, which is absolutely are counterproductive for sleep. So what I’ve been doing lately that’s been really effective and I wanted to share with you all is just talking to myself differently before bed saying “you can go to sleep without the heating pad, you can go to sleep even if you have numbness in your hands, the numbness and tingling is not a bad thing and sleep is gonna happen. It’s gonna be OK.”

And just by talking to myself differently. I can tell that I’m bringing the temperature down in my nervous system. I can tell that I’m bringing the fear signals down in my brain. That I’m not able to go to sleep and so I wanna pass this along too because it’s a really powerful tool psychologist itself talk it this way that we talk to yourself and more alarmist you are with yourself the more you’re going to rev up your nervous system and that’s gonna be counterproductive for your experience of your symptoms in your body, but also your ability to sleep or function otherwise. Also, you can flip the script and so if self-talk is more of the positive and I’m OK this is gonna be all right. I can actually sleep with us. It’s no big deal then I can bring everything down. It can bring that nervous system down so I want to share that with you in case it could help you and this is something I love so if you have questions, feel free to click on the contact button below. Would love to speak with you more all right take care bye

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hesselaine@gmail.com

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Self-Talk and Chronic Health Conditions

Navigating Daylight Savings Time

Navigating Daylight Savings Time

hesselaine@gmail.com

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