Choose Your Own Adventure

When we think of life with chronic illness we don’t often think of having a choice. We are stuck with this illness, we didn’t choose it. If we could choose, we certainly wouldn’t choose to be sick, we wouldn’t choose the uncertainty that comes with chronic illness. But, we do have choices and a great post over on Pillow Fort reminded me of that, Lizzy’s post also reminded me of an author that I love -Gabby Bernstein. I read her book, Spirit Junkie, a few years ago and it really helped change my path towards one of forgiveness and positivity, despite pain.

So, how can you choose your own adventure when you are living with chronic illness?

Simple. You can’t choose whether or not you hurt or are fatigued, but you can choose how you respond to it. You can choose whether your illness controls your life. And, you can make choices that decrease the fatigue and pain, that decrease your symptoms.

But, how can you make choices to reduce your symptoms if the illness is out of your control?

It seems like a Catch-22, but it’s not. You can’t make the illness go away completely but you can choose how much it controls your life. For each of us those choices are going to look differently, and it may take some time to figure out what choices you can make that will help you.

For me, there were several choices that really helped me improve my life with chronic illness:

• I chose to focus on the positive – It’s so easy to get bogged down in negativity, especially when you are hurting, and it takes a lot of work to get out of that slump once you are there. But, doing the work was worthwhile for me. I found that avoiding negativity and focusing on the positive helped reduce my stress, and reducing my stress helped reduce my pain and fatigue.
• I chose to reduce stress – this one goes way beyond just focusing on the positive. For me, it also means avoiding watching the news, staying away from discussions of politics and religion, and even limiting my time on social media. I’ve also found that extreme action and horror movies tend to increase my stress. I can’t avoid all forms of stress completely (as much as I’d love to) but there are many forms that I can avoid and I do. The ones I can’t avoid I minimize and I find ways to reduce the stress related to those things by proper planning and time management.
• I choose to manage my time – I used to be a multi-tasker. Not anymore (at least not most of the time). Not only can I not really focus on multiple things anymore, but I found that doing so added stress. Managing my time decreases stress because it allows me to ensure that I get what I need/want to do done without stressing about it. I also used to be a procrastinator. I’d love to say that trait has been completely stomped, but I have learned to mitigate it greatly. I no longer wait till the last minute to do things, I get them done as early as possible so that I don’t have to worry about what might happen if I have a bad (health) day the day before it was due.
• I choose healthy food – I used to eat a lot of junk. Processed and fast food was easy and convenient, but it wasn’t really the healthiest option. I bought into the hype that processed stuff was just as good for you as whole food. That is until I reached a point where I had to do things differently, and where I was willing to try anything. It wasn’t until I gave a different choice a try that I found that I’d been wrong all along. I felt so much better avoiding certain foods (gluten, dairy, eggs) and choosing whole foods over processed foods. Once I knew how good that felt I couldn’t choose anything else.

So, what do you do to choose your own health adventure?