AWSOME DAY – Even With Pain!
When you have chronic pain is easy to feel like every day is chalked up to another same old same old. Though, there are days where the stars align, our pain levels are managed, and we have an awesome day. In the beginning, these days are rare – though with knowing a few tricks, you can have an awesome day more often.
Schedule an awesome day
The first step to having awesome day is planning for your day to have enough things to do and enough time to rest that you can allow it to be an awesome day. Make sure you have something to do earlier in the days that gets you up out of bed, moving and doing. Even getting out the door or tackling some task around the house, having visitors – ANYTHING that starts the day off and makes you have something to look forward to earlier in the day.
Then follow that up with having some time to really enjoy life. Something like a nice relaxing lunch, watching a show, reading a book, or being in the moment. Having something enjoyable in the middle of the day or early afternoon allows you to recharge and gain some emotional energy points to handle stressors later in the day or to sloth off the stresses of the morning. If you choose to meditate, remember that 9 minutes is the minimum therapeutic level – so it is easy to take that small amount of time to do meditative coloring, take a walk, do focused meditation or use a meditative toy. Avoid excuses by planning this time as a way to increase your likelihood of saving the time latter of not being stressed or overwhelmed. I like to think of this time like buying insurrence against having a bad day later. It buffers the stress and provides a good likelihood of an AWSOME day!
Lastly, know if you need to have that late afternoon or early evening rest as well. Anything undertaken now to take care of yourself or even just not have too much going on as you transition form day to evening. Many people with pain or health issues, including mental health, have “sundown” syndrome where as the sunsets, they feel more symptomatic. This is often due to the stress of the day building up and the stress of finishing the day still looming. Just like traffic when driving, consider all these things when you’re making your plans for your evening. Make sure they you know what you are doing for dinner – if you need to start that early, use a crockpot, go out, or if you don’t have a plan for nice dinner, that you are looking forward to some time to rest or connect with others in the evening. To feel like you have an awesome day it needs to be the WHOLE day, try not to neglect the evening and then go to bed feeling less than awesome.
Do Your Alternative Therapies
A lot of my clients think that they only need to do some of their alternative therapies – such as ice and heat – anything other than pills, only when they’re hurting bad. Though, this is the first big mistake you can make. EVERYDAY do ALL of your alternative therapies that provide you some relief and find a time during the day to do at least a handful even if you’re feeling low on the pain scale, This helps to skim-off the top of your pain as you’re going through the day. Just by being stimulated (movement, stress, activity) through the day, most of us accrue bigger pain as the day progresses. Thus, it is important to keep pain at bay by being ahead of the big pain and pulling that pain level down with alternative therapies as you go instead of waiting for the big pain that may take days to calm down. It may seem like a low of work and a lot of time, but overall it will help you save time and be more predictable. By keeping your pain tapped down, you have fewer bad days and more times you can be productive and interactive in life. So, don’t fight your treatments, instead, make them part of your daily life.
Have A Positive Outlook
To have an awesome day we have to have the correct outlook and expectation. If you expect the day to go horribly, then you prove yourself right – even a sense of being stuck at a red light for too long or having a little bit of extra pain for a little while makes you throw in the towel for the whole day. It’s important for us to understand that our pain can have a moment, that life has its own moment, and that it’s not going to be a whole day – so it can still be an awesome day. Set yourself up for knowing that you are going to have fun a bit, you’re going to be a bit productive, that you are going to connect with others, or whatever else your overarching goal is to be that day and make THAT happen. Know that you can have some bumps in the road, and that it will not be perfect and overall you have an awesome day and hope that you have more and more be as time goes on.
I hope you use these pointers and have an awesome day, and can then use this plan to have even more awesome days whether it be a Monday, holiday, or even your birthday.
Take care,
Dr. Chelsie
PS: If you are ready for the NEXT LEVEL in Pain Management go here: https://www.drchelsie.com/enroll