Living with Chronic Illness or Pain Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery Episode 20a

Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to give you the information and tools that Doc Snipes provides his clients so that you two can start

living

happier lives. Our website DocSnipes.com has even more resources, videos, handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to DocSnipes.com for more information. I would like to welcome everyone to today's presentation on Happiness is Not Brain Surgery with Knives, Practical Tools to Improve Mood and Quality of Life. Today we are going to talk about how to live with

pain

and

chronic

illness

.

Start by exploring the prevalence and characteristics of

chronic

diseases, the characteristics of

pain

and the effects, or at least some of the effects, of pain and chronic diseases, and the possible interventions you could use to help you deal with those conditions, whenever necessary. I have them so let's start with chronic

illness

es, unfortunately chronic illnesses seem to be the new normal and what do I mean by that? It means that about half of all American adults are diagnosed with a chronic disease according to the National Health Council and I put a link to this in PowerPoint so you can see because the numbers are a little surprising when you start looking at them, we consider normal what The majority of the population experiences it and from this study it appears that the majority of the population is diagnosed with at least one chronic illness, what is the same thing?

What can we do well? One of the things we can do is start looking towards prevention and early intervention rather than waiting until they actually happen, but we'll get there later in the future. presentation Chronic illnesses are those things that include asthma cancer chronic pain you know if you have an injury and you have chronic pain something happens diabetes fibromyalgia heart disease or high blood pressure lupus Lyme disease and any form of mental illness that is ongoing, so that there is a lot of different things that can happen and as you will see in this presentation, when people develop a chronic physical illness, many times a mental health problem also develops at the same time because they are stressed about it, because their life changes. because We're grieving the loss of certain abilities or functions that we used to have or that we used to be able to do, and we're starting to look at some of them, so let's start with grief because grief is one of those things that even if it's not. chronic, it can really affect your mood and if you have a prolonged period of pain, I know people who have had rotator cuff

surgery

and other things like that and it has caused them pain for months, so any type of pain that is more than a couple of days can really start to impact your life your lifestyle your mood let's talk about ways to try to prevent the negative impact as much as possible, although it's important to remember that everyone has pain sometimes, I want I mean if you don't have pain you probably aren't

living

so accept the fact that some days you will wake up, have a knot in your neck, get a headache, it happens and sometimes you may even have pain that lasts. a few days if you lift too hard if you do something to pull a muscle, but it usually goes away because our bodies are incredibly resilient when you're in pain, regardless of whether it's acute, meaning it's just starting. and it hasn't been happening so you're trying to figure out what's causing it or if it's chronic, it's been happening for a while, it's important to know its characteristics so you can help your care team better identify what's causing it and things that they can do to help intervene, so some of the characteristics of pain that you want to consider are, you know, is she a cute witch?, it just happened, you know, last weekend, you woke up and it hurt. or is it chronic, has it been happening for a couple of weeks or a couple of months what is the characteristic of the pain is it stabbing pain stabbing burning all of the above is it stabbing sometimes throbbing sometimes what is the difference will help your care team to better differentiate if it is constant or intermittent? stationary meaning it stays in one place for example if you have shoulder pain or it radiates so it's in the shoulder but it radiates from your arm to your hand and if you have any numbness those are all the things your doctor will want to do. they know and all the things that your care team and your physical therapists and all of those people are going to want to know because that's how they're going to be able to, first of all, identify what may be going on, but also help you identify when things are starting to get worse. improve because sometimes if it's intermittent pain, if you reduce the frequency with which it occurs, instead of occurring every other day, it only occurs once a week, which shows significant improvement, those are the things you'll want to look at , but what are they? the effects of pain and chronic diseases we talk about pain and you know that many people have chronic diseases, so what are the effects of those diseases on people in general?

I don't just mean mood because pain and chronic illnesses affect your entire body. The biopsychosocial lifestyle affects how your body functions, it affects your mental health, and it can affect your relationships and other things, so let's start with depression because that's one of the most common characteristics that I see when people have been diagnosed with pain. chronic or chronic illness and They come to my office and say: You know, doctor, I'm depressed. Well, let's take a look at what its symptoms are. Depression is a diagnosis. Fatigue. Sleep disturbances. A feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. And negative and pessimistic thoughts.

So let's think about it. that if you have chronic pain or a chronic illness, if you wake up every morning and you don't feel optimal, it can lead to some thoughts of hopelessness and helplessness, you know, nothing's going to get better. I can't seem to get it. After this, I will never go back to the way I used to be. Those are thoughts that are not uncommon for people with chronic pain and illness. When you think these thoughts frequently, it causes stress on the body and can contribute to fatigue and sleep disorders. when you're in pain you don't sleep well you know, I don't think I can identify anyone who says oh yeah, I had excruciating pain when I went to sleep last night I slept like a baby, especially if you're not taking painkillers to make the pain go away, so you should understand that when something is wrong with your body, you will feel pain or you may have a chronic illness that prevents you from sleeping and that fatigue and sleep disorders make you feel exhausted.

It makes you feel exhausted when every day you wake up and never seem to be able to wake up. You know you are there existing as a shell in your body again. You may begin to feel feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. We can see how pain and chronic illness can lead to some feelings of depression. What do we do? Mindfulness comes first. If you are aware of what you need at the moment and your symptoms, you will notice it when they start to appear. better you will notice things that help improve them and things you can do to help the pain go away things you can do to delay another resurgence of the chronic disease things you can do if you have diabetes, for example, that Stabilize your blood sugar level blood, so you need to be aware of how you live and how you treat your body and what your body needs if you need a nap, you know that taking a short nap may not be the worst thing you'll obviously want. work with your care team, but mindfulness is the first step because if you're just feeling bored and you throw anything at it, you're just spitting out, you're trying to figure out what's going to make you better, it's probably not the most efficient thing in the world.

Good sleep habits help even if you're not sleeping your best, and like I said, if you're in a lot of pain, you're probably not going to sleep your best, but if you're sleeping well. With these habits you are creating a situation where you could sleep better, which will probably improve your sleep a little and will all help maintain your circadian rhythms, so try not to take long naps during the day, try to get up at relatively the same time . time each day and go to sleep at relatively the same time each night so your body knows when it should be awake and when it should be asleep.

This goes a long way to letting your body know that your

brain

knows when to start secreting those sleep hormones. the things that you can control and that are good, then what things can you do?, what things are still under your control, if you feel hopeless and helpless, it's true, there may be some things that you just can't control right now, however, what can you control and With many chronic diseases, taking good care of your body and managing stress are two very important things that will help mitigate the problem and most chronic diseases get worse if you know the general health behaviors and high stress, so identify what things. you can control in your life and environment what improves the condition and eat healthily to support the functioning of serotonin, among other things, serotonin is one of those chemicals, not the only one that is involved in the perception of pain , so if you don't have enough serotonin, you can feel a tear everywhere now there are others, you know your endogenous opioids and all that other stuff, however, let's start with the simple things you know, get decent nutrition, I'm not saying that you eliminate the things you love and only eat rabbit. food What I'm saying is do what you can to eat healthy and get good protein every day.

Anxiety is another emotional symptom of pain and chronic illness. When you wake up and every morning and you are faced with this condition, you may think that things will not get better, you may worry that things will never get better and what are you going to do, you may get stressed because it is getting worse, you know that You wake up one morning and you're in eighth gear of what you were. the day before and you may panic thinking, "Oh my God, this condition is getting so much worse." You may also become stressed and anxious about the consequences of the condition or pain, such as, will you lose your job because you can?

You are no longer on your feet for eight hours or have more and more absences due to your condition. What will happen to your relationships if you can't be the same person? If you can't do the same things you could do. Before your diagnosis, what will happen to your relationships? If you are one of those people who loves to go to the gym, exercise or stay in shape, maybe hiking or doing yoga, you may be wondering how you will be able to do it. Stay fit and keep your body healthy if you feel pain all the time or if you have another chronic illness that exhausts you so much that some days you can barely get out of bed, so this anxiety is definitely what you can do. see some of the reasons for this, well we can't necessarily make all those things go away, so what do we do?

Avoid stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine. I say avoid it, ideally eliminate it. I'm realistic, if you can narrow it down. and definitely reducing it a lot before bed, it will significantly improve your sleep and will probably help your condition, but that is between you and your doctor how much it will reduce in those who educate themselves about the disorder and the likelihood of things changing. It's going to get worse if you follow your treatment plan and don't manage it, many chronic diseases will get worse, but if you're doing all the right things, what's the chance that overnight or even over the course of a week it will just go away? ?

To lose control, this will help give you a foundation, if you will, or some education, so that if you start to feel worse, you can avoid freaking out. Keep track of your good and bad days. Notice what helps you on your good days and. I mean, be open-minded about it, if you're getting more sunlight, if you know the weather, you know maybe it was a bad day and you noticed a storm front coming in and your arthritis was getting worse. Doctors don't agree on whether changes in the frontal boundaries affect arthritis, but I think most of us with arthritis will tell you that we notice a difference, so whether it's anecdotal or real, keep track of those things because Whatever works for you, whatever works to help you feel better, is what's going to be important and you can share this with your care team.

Practice distress tolerance skills. Distress intolerance will make you feel more anxious. Your thoughts are something like I can't keep feeling like this. This is going to drive me completely crazy. I don't know if I can continue this way. Discomfort tolerance skills help you accept that this is just the way things are. So what can I do now to improve in the next moment? What can I do to make lemonade with lemons? Or you know how you want. Put it out there and I have full videos, full podcasts ondiscomfort tolerance skills, so we're not going to delve into them in this podcast.

Use the challenging questions worksheet to identify anxiety-provoking thoughts again. I have a whole podcast about that, but basically what. The challenging questions worksheet says what is your thought, for example, things will never get better, what is the evidence, not what are your feelings, what is the evidence for and against that thought? In this case, then you want to see how reliable the evidence is. Do you have good information that things will never get better and then you want to see if you are using emotional reasoning and this again is not facts these are your feelings if you feel like things are never going to get better if you feel hopeless and helpless but there is no real evidence to back it up then You may be making decisions and thinking thoughts that are based solely on emotional reasoning.

So what other emotions might you have? How could you have empowered thinking? How could you have an optimistic thought that could change your thoughts a little and maybe this condition will never go away? far away however there are things you can do to improve your life while living with it people who have HIV people who have diabetes people who have high blood pressure those conditions are not going to go away however most of them live a very high quality of life , they just have to make some minor adjustments, so interpreting it in a state of empowerment rather than a disempowering one where the condition is absorbing all your control will help you feel a little better and the blame is the anger towards yourself when you you feel guilty because you missed your children's ball game your anger angry at yourself for missing your children's ball game then the guilt is your anger for not being able to do all the things you used to do not being able to get out of bed today because the pain It's a shame not to be able to fill in the blank.

I mean, this could go on for hours and it can make you lash out at other people and push them away because you're upset about the fact that they could do that or because you don't want to. disappointing them because you know you can't be the friend you think they should be, so there's a lot of cognitive distortions. There are interventions for this. Think about how you would like your child or best friend to feel if they were in your position. Would you like them to feel guilty because they felt too bad to get out of bed or because they couldn't attend the awards ceremony because they didn't feel well?

How would you like them to feel? Many times we hold ourselves to a higher standard than other people, get rid of the homework, you know I can't be the friend, I think I should be, well, what kind of friend can you be? Let's take advantage of your strengths, what can you offer in a relationship? What can you offer? As a parent, what can you offer as an employee? That's what you build and you just knock it out of the park. Yes, there may be some parts that you think you should do, that you would like to do, and that you can't. do more, but if you excel at the things you can do, a lot of times that makes up for it, so focus on the things you can do and decide if it's worth using your energy to get angry at yourself in the world about this situation, this guilt. it really does. any good is punishing yourself for something eternally it has a purpose feel guilty for a moment that's your

brain

telling you you know what you may have messed up here accept it identify it say you know what you have on the right side of your brain you have the right thought here but if i keep beating myself up a wet noodle is going to do any good so how can I prevent this in the future?

How can I make up for it? How can I mitigate it in the future? Maybe there will be times when you still won't be able to make ball games for your kids because you're on call or something, so what do you do instead? How can you be realistic about what you can do? So the important point that everyone experiences is paying sometimes, it's just a fact of life paying indicates that something may be wrong doesn't necessarily indicate that something super catastrophic is wrong may indicate that you slept poorly and have a knot in your neck may indicate that you haven't drunk enough water Pain is usually kind of your body telling you to pay attention to something that's a little off here, but it doesn't necessarily mean that something catastrophic is going to happen.

People who experience chronic pain or illness or a prolonged attack of pain may experience feelings of depression. anxiety and guilt those are natural feelings the key is to identify what is causing those feelings and address them so you can use your energy in a more productive way to start feeling better and all of these depression, anxiety and guilt are emotions that cause stress, we know that increased stress is going to make pain and chronic conditions worse so we have to address them and that is one of the things you can do to help you be all that you can be, to quote the military, there are many different ways to address feelings and it is important to discover what works for you anxiety, fear and anger are your body's response to some type of physical, social or self-concept threat, so they may not be Tigers coming to devour you, can be a threat to your self-concept because whatever is happening is preventing you from being the person you think you should be should be a really destructive word, you know, let's focus on who you are and what you can do and what you will do in Instead of what you should do, blame is Anger directed at yourself has a purpose like all our feelings and you feel it, you identify it, you go, yes, I screwed up, what can I do to improve next moment?

Holding on to it and nurturing it doesn't do anyone any good and depression is a feeling. of hopelessness and helplessness that arises when pain, anxiety or guilt never seems to be remembered, depression is your fatigue and lethargy, which may be caused in part by chronic illness, so that is something you can resolve with your healthcare team, but you also want to pay attention to depression caused by negative thoughts and feelings of being completely trapped and not being able to be the person you want to be and address that

happiness

. This is brain

surgery

, it is an educational podcast and does not replace all medical advice.

Health decisions should be made together with your healthcare provider. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Join our Facebook group at Doc Snipes comm slash Facebook or join our community and access additional resources at Doc Snipes com. Thanks for tuning in. to

happiness

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