Everything is what we think, and we can change what we think and change our reality.
Everything is what we think, and we can change what we think and change our reality.
EVERYTHING IS WHAT WE THINK, AND WE CAN CHANGE WHAT WE THINK AND CHANGE OUR REALITY!
No matter how many times and how many ways this realization crops up in my life…EVERY TIME…yes, EVERY TIME(!)…I am utterly in complete awe of the profound magnitude this very, very simple concept…CHANGE WHAT WE THINK…has on our individual reality. It is one of the easiest things we can do, it takes only an instant and it requires nothing from anyone else…and when we do it, our whole individual reality changes!
I’m simply in awe.
So let me explain.
I guess I’ve been talking about changing what we think, in so many posts already…when I “minimize it” (fibromyalgia)…when I live in “deliberate denial” (of fibromyalgia)…when I “fake it ‘til I make it” (for fibromyalgia)…when I really think about it…it all comes down to the basic underlying concept of changing what I think…that’s it…that’s all.
So simple…and so powerful…and for me…so CRITICAL for living with fibromyalgia.
I change what I think, all the time…and it changes the reality that I face in living with fibromyalgia…and it makes my reality better…a lot better.
Think about the chronic fatigue, such a huge and overwhelming part of the fibromyalgia struggle. For many of the fifteen years I’ve lived with fibromyalgia, especially the early years, this tiredness wasn’t alleviated by any amount of sleep and rest…not any amount I was able to get anyways. If I could have slept all the time…maybe it would have been…I don’t know…but that was never going to be possible for me…and I’m guessing, it’s not possible for anyone else (and who wants their life to be like that anyways?…we have places to go, people to see, things to do!…lives to live!).
So I needed something more (than getting more sleep) to combat the chronic fatigue. I needed to break the vicious cycle I perpetually lived in…my chronic fatigue made me have to struggle through EVERYTHING (as in, figuratively, crawling through each day) and this was so very stressful to try to function this way…and then, of course, the resultant stress, in turn, aggravated my chronic fatigue, as is the case with so many health issues. It is such a hard, hard cycle to break (but you know that). And no amount of sleep seemed to help the chronic fatigue side so I figured I needed to change the stress side.
I figured I needed to get positive to lessen the stress. (But I WASN’T positive when I was so tired and so overloaded because I couldn’t get everything done that I needed to get done when I was so lie-down exhausted all the time! In fact I was miserable, being on this exhaustion treadmill-of-a-life. And being miserable was stressful…so, you guessed it…more exhaustion.)
So in my mind, there was (and still is) only one way out…I had to CHANGE WHAT I THINK first.
I had to just switch my thinking to suddenly NOW think that I wasn’t miserable…that I was, in fact, happy…to lessen the stress…and then that would lessen the chronic fatigue (exactly, “fake it ‘til I make it”, as I talked about in my last post)…and I have to say, as hard as it may be to believe, it works! And still, to this day, I do this whenever I need to. Whenever I realize I need to CHANGE WHAT I THINK…I give myself a shake…maybe I look at the bigger picture of life…I find some (any) different way to look at it that will lead me to a different way to think about it…a more positive way…a less stressful way…and there(!)…that’s where I want to be.
And we can just CHANGE WHAT WE THINK. Years ago, this would have seemed very hard for me; I used to think we felt what we felt and we couldn’t change that.
But somewhere along the way I learned to choose how I would feel, because I would choose what I would think first.
Now sometimes it seems to me that I’m trying to “get happy” about everything then, to help alleviate my fibromyalgia symptoms, but when I really think about it, it’s not so much that happiness is the key (although happiness is very nice!)…I think it’s more that I can’t be stressed…stress is the big offender…and I find happiness lessens stress for me. So I do try to “get happy” and therefore lessen stress and I can honestly say it unmistakably always makes my symptoms improve…a lot.
So by now, I do this regularly…CHANGE WHAT I THINK…to change how I feel…to be happy…to lessen stress…to lessen my symptoms.
There’s the time I told my husband (half-jokingly) that I would have to be happy about him (potentially) being seriously ill when some routine medical tests revealed a potential very serious issue. We were already super stressed, just trying to keep our heads above water, going through a time in life when difficult circumstances just kept coming at us, when this got lumped on us too. So far I had been managing to not “crash” (as I thought of it) with my fibromyalgia, which was already pretty amazing, considering. I knew I just couldn’t take on one more stressful thing, so I have to say, I did find a way to twist my thinking to not be upset and try to think positive (kind of tricking myself really, I guess) about it!
I still can’t believe how I managed to sail through that, without getting stressed at all, really! And it didn’t end up being anything serious, so, when it was all over, I pretty much easily came through what could have been a seriously distraught time, without worsening or “crashing” my fibromyalgia symptoms at all.
I wish I could say I was always able to do that, but I sure try to remember times like this as a reminder of what’s possible, for the next time. For me it’s a good lesson here to remember. As a wise woman I know (okay, it’s my mom) has said to me many times in my lifetime, “worry about it when it happens”. And that may say it all, in these situations.
Okay, but even when “it” happens, I have figured out ways not to worry about it(!)…because worry (stress) is for sure the enemy of fibromyalgia. So I still CHANGE WHAT I THINK. Like, say something upsetting happens…I do this thing whereby I “fast forward” my thoughts ahead to the future, maybe about a year’s time when this upsetting thing won’t really matter anymore, it will just be a thing of the past that happened to me…I imagine how I will feel indifferent then (and maybe even be laughing about it!)…and then (here’s the cool part) I instantly “rewind” that indifferent mind-set/feelings back to the present!! Believe it or not…it really works! I CHANGE WHAT I THINK by basically, thinking ahead to the future and then fast forwarding my mind-set to then.
Yes, I CHANGE MY THINKING…I’m continually amazed how this works! Another little thing I do often…is I take something I’m not looking forward to, something I have to get through but I don’t want to do and maybe that one thing is dragging my whole day down…and then I just CHANGE MY THINKING and I decide I’m looking forward to it…once I decide I should do this, I just switch it (my thinking). It’s that easy. I latch onto whatever I can that helps me to change my thinking to positive. Now I’m looking forward to it, maybe I think of all the little things about it and how they could be positive, and suddenly the thing that was dragging my day down is now a good thing, so my day is much better now…no reason it isn’t a great day now! It’s kind of tricking myself for sure…but it works!
CHANGING OUR THINKING…changes the way we feel…lifts our mood…reduces stress…reduces fibromyalgia symptoms too.
And life is so much nicer this way…AND it’s really fun to try…it’s really fun to see if just a simple easy thing like CHANGING MY THINKING can make a difference. Each time is a fun little mini experiment…after all, what do I have to lose?…for the most part I’m just thinking more positive…and seeing what happens! I can’t think of a downside to thinking more positive…but, as I talked about in my previous post about being positive, from my experience of over fifteen years of living with fibromyalgia, there seems to be A LOT of upside.
So this really is one of my favourite things to talk about…because I’m so totally amazed at it myself…it never gets old for me…because what I know is real is that we CAN change our individual reality (and our happiness), just by CHANGING WHAT WE THINK. We can just suddenly (in an instant) take a load off (wow, life feels easier suddenly)…and get all the psychological and physiological benefits that go with it.
We don’t need anything else or anyone else for it to happen…we don’t need to have money…I can’t think of any roadblocks. It doesn’t depend on anything else but our self and our own power to think…and from what I can tell…this is a huge, huge power.
And oh yes…definitely don’t take my word for it…try it for yourself…just for the fun of it…and see what happens…
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I have a tendency of changing my train of thought too, you’re right, it helps. But what can I do differently for the pain, for times when my husband turns over in bed and I pray that he will get comfortable soon so he can stop moving? It hurts, every joint, shocking pain especially my thighs. What do you take?
Yes, it’s definitely one of the tools in the tool box that I use to decrease stress but you’re right, we need so much more. For myself, I have not taken any medications. I have been able to manage without them by keeping up routines that all work together to help minimize my symptoms, more of a preventative approach. I explain them throughout many posts but this post https://www.soisfibromyalgiareal.com/fifteen-years-and-still-managing-without-meds-fibromyalgia-and-medication/ probably gives a good overview for you to understand overall. If you have any further questions, Lett, ask away, I’ll be happy to try to answer the best I can. Hope this is of some help to you, thanks very much for your feedback!
I’m finding your post a bit difficult to follow without a step one, step two, step three. And maybe I’m over thinking it or it could be the brain fog. Do you find that by tricking yourself, as you call it, that you’re ignoring mental health that needs to be addressed?
I fight several autoimmune diseases that all add to my pain scale plus I have bone lesions and fractures due to multiple myeloma so my pain is so extremely high. Tricking myself out of the exhaustion, pain, and depression that results seems unrealistic and going without pain meds akin to torture. I’m addressing the stressor (mostly financial in nature) and how I respond to it to then reduce the stress. More of a direct approach in my opinion. I’ve taken up enough space. Blessings.
Hi Petula, thanks so much for your feedback. You certainly have a lot on your plate to deal with, having multiple conditions that I’m sure are all intertwined in very complex ways. My heart goes out to you!
While my blog speaks mainly about fibromyalgia, I have many years of experience with other chronic illnesses as well and I’ve always found stress to be a significant cause of flare ups of my symptoms for every illness. So over the years I’ve developed all sorts of ways to come at this issue of trying to find ways to avoid letting myself become stressed over all the various circumstances that may happen in my life. In this post I talk about just one of these many strategies, many of my other posts containing others.
In a nutshell, here I’m simply talking about framing circumstances that may happen in my life in a more positive light, to feel less stressed. It’s simply a question of changing my perspective from a glass half empty perspective to a glass half full perspective. I find when I catch myself being stressed/negative about some situation and I make an effort to reframe my thinking to something more positive, it lessens stress on me, which in turn helps to lessen symptoms as stress is a key trigger of my fibromyalgia symptoms. It’s simply one tactic amongst many I use to minimize symptoms that would usually flare up due to stress.
I love this strategy because I don’t have to wait for my circumstances to change for my mindset to change. And no, I don’t feel this is ignoring mental health that needs to be addressed at all. In fact, being able to do this contributes to amazingly great mental health!