I Have Fibromyalgia…I Work on Stress…The Fibromyalgia and Stress Connection

It seems so simple…it SHOULD be simple…your body hurts, hmm, what do you do? A – Soak in a tub? B – Get a massage? Or C – Pop a pill? ‎Maybe…all of the above?

They all sound reasonable, but for me, none of the above is the answer.

I have fibromyalgia…I work on stress. 

You had lots of sleep but you still feel tired, hmm, what do you do?  A – Have a coffee? B – Have a nap? Or C – Have two coffees, then have a nap? They all might help…and sometimes I try them…but I have fibromyalgia…so mostly, I still…WORK ON STRESS. ‎

So let me explain.

It’s the very first thing I learned about my fibromyalgia, probably close to a year before I even got my diagnosis. I don’t think I’d even heard of fibromyalgia yet. And I certainly didn’t know then that I had already probably pinpointed the most important thing I may ever need to know about my fibromyalgia. It would take me years of muddling through trial and error living with fibromyalgia to realize this though.

For the entire year before my fibromyalgia ‘attack’-like symptoms came on, I was having very vague off and on symptoms. It was hard to put a finger on it, but something was oddly different and in a whole new way that I had never felt before…and it wasn’t good. My doctor did a full blood work up on me twice, but nothing.

But here’s the thing…when these uncomfortable vague “symptoms” came over me, I found I could lie down on my couch and completely relax and clear my head and just breathe deeply, I guess to instinctively, try to de-stress…and the symptoms went away.

I could de-stress and the symptoms went away.

Still to this day, it’s the first thing I do when I feel some throbbing or stabbing pain or some other unwanted symptom starting up…I take a deep breath or two and I relax‎…right on the spot…and I see if that makes even a bit of difference…if it does, I know it’s likely a fibromyalgia symptom and I need to check my stress level right away before the pain or symptom really gets a chance to take hold and stay awhile (or a long while).

Yes, at some point during my over fifteen years of trial and error living with fibromyalgia, I came to realize what an important piece of the fibromyalgia puzzle that stress is…and at some time I came to the point where as soon as any symptoms that I believe are fibromyalgia-related begin to start up, my first thought is always, (always!), “OKAY, WHAT’S STRESSING ME?”…and next, “How can I alleviate that stress to feel better physically again?”

Never do I think of what medication I can take for the symptoms, nor whether I should soak in a tub or maybe get a massage or anything else to “treat” that body part. This may sound odd, but I rarely try to physically attend to my body and/or the body part that is painful or aching or just not feeling normal or right in some way…I guess after all these years, I’ve come to know that it doesn’t seem to be about the “body part of the moment”.

It’s almost always about stress…the underlying CAUSE is, more often than not…STRESS.

Of course, I’m not saying others couldn’t or shouldn’t soak in a tub, get a massage or take medication to be more comfortable. Once in awhile I’ll take an ibuprofen or an acetominophen for a headache flare, or maybe put a bit of pain cream on my lower back, after I realize the (stress) cause and am working on it but I want a bit of relief here and there to get me through until I’ve alleviated the stress and the symptoms have subsided which can often take days, weeks or even months to play out in my body, depending on how stressed I was and how severe the symptoms were.

As I explained in an earlier post about how I came to not take any ongoing medications for my fibromyalgia in these last fifteen years, I guess I always instinctively worked on getting at the root of the problem, to try to ultimately get rid of the problem (fibromyalgia!). So, this is purely a personal thing, but knowing I am already working on the underlying cause, stress, while also being focused on my busy life…I usually just put up with the pain and/or exhaustion and/or discomfort of whatever the “symptoms of the moment” happen to be while I wait for the changes I’ve made in my stress level to play out in my body and reduce the symptoms.

In addition, seeing how the changes play out (on their own) provides a good indicator for me…when the symptoms are gone, I know I’m now no longer letting myself get stressed to the point that it is straining my health.

Yes, apparently all illnesses are affected by stress but in my experience fibromyalgia seems to be SUPER affected by stress.

And the stresses that it seems that most “regular” people’s bodies absorb without any obvious ill effects…well, ours get affected by them…big time! And it doesn’t have to be a major stress…even just low-level stress IS STRESS as far as fibromyalgia is concerned…even positive stress IS STRESS as far as fibromyalgia is concerned.

Half the time, I don’t even know I’m stressed at all until I get symptoms. Then, from experience, I now know the first thing to evaluate (if I’m not obviously low on good sleep…which IS actually also a stress on our body) is “Okay, what is stressing me!?!”. And then I realize, “Oh, I guess I HAVE been kind of on edge about some upcoming event or something.”  So I try to relax about it, and…wow, hard to believe, but…the symptoms disappear(!)…oh man, sometimes such minor stresses cause fibromyalgia symptoms!!

And I find that, since I’ve had fibromyalgia, EVERYTHING is just so much harder when I’m stressed. Any number of a myriad of uncomfortable and annoying to downright scary fibromyalgia symptoms will flare up. My workout that is normally easy to manageable for me to do, becomes gruelling to push through. A good night’s sleep becomes much less likely because of flaring pain‎. And I can feel the energy suddenly draining from my chronic fatigue body as it transforms into “the block”, seemingly immovable and being pulled down (with almost an accelerated gravitational pull) till it finds somewhere, anywhere(!) to just lie down and melt.

Yes, it seems kind of odd that I’ve written all these posts about my experiences with fibromyalgia and I haven’t written one specifically about fibromyalgia and stress until now, given that I believe it’s one of the two major influences on my fibromyalgia symptoms, the other one being lack of good sleep (which is in fact also a stress). But when I really think about it, I’ve been writing about it all along. So many of the things I’ve written about HAVE been directly or indirectly about ways to reduce or handle stress, because, well, in my experience it seems that STRESS IS THE PIVOTOL FACTOR THAT SO MUCH OF MY FIBROMYALGIA HINGES ON.

I’ve written about combatting fibromyalgia with a healthy lifestyle including working out and a healthy diet, which all help me to REDUCE STRESS. I’ve written about changing how I think, living in “deliberate denial” and “faking it ‘til I make it” to help me “minimize” fibromyalgia in my life by REDUCING STRESS. I’ve written about how knowing that I become what I say and the importance of being positive while being open to being inspired by others have all helped me fight off depression and REDUCE STRESS too. I’ve written about how hard I’ve worked on getting good sleep to seemingly help to manually reset my brain each day to REDUCE STRESS and feel better overall.

Wow, that’s a LOT of stuff I’ve written about to REDUCE STRESS…so, in a nutshell, how DO we reduce stress? It’s coming at us ‎from so many different angles and in so many ways. It’s so unpredictable…what life will throw at us and stress us…we just can’t control that, we can’t control lots of our life circumstances and the stresses that come with them.

So many stresses. Stresses of everyday life, stresses of being overloaded (especially WITH fibromyalgia), ‎major life events (apparently good and bad are equally stressful on us), world events, plus, unfortunately tragic life events that may happen to us or our loved ones.

Yes, they say there’s only two things certain in life, death and taxes. Well, I would submit a third…STRESS.

And personally, when there’s no specific stressful events happening in my life (good or bad), so much of my day-to-day stress comes from being so overloaded. Keeping up a busy life, wanting to do things for myself, trying to have time to do fun things with my family…all on a limited and unpredictable time line as to when I’ll be ‘good enough’ to do anything at all given my ever-changing, up and down, and needing-to-be-oh-so-carefully-managed-fibromyalgia-life. And then if I take on too much, it’s only ends up being self-defeating…(well, you know the drill)…symptoms and/or exhaustion flare up and I’m struggling to just get the bare minimum done once again!

And even when I know all the right things‎ to do and I am managing to do them, well, sometimes others impose obligations on me. Sometimes I’ve been hanging in there through a really tough, busy stressful time, but I’m managing to hang in there without setting off any major fibromyalgia flare (accomplishment!) and then someone wants me to fit something in and I just know that I would be overdoing it if I did it. I can tell that I’m at my “stress limit” of what I can take on…after over fifteen years, I know it well! So either I do it because others want, or…I choose my health and turn them down.

I’ve found that usually either pick leads to a total crash. Either I (over)do it to keep them happy and then crash, or…I turn them down and they dump on me (yes, even when I’ve explained my fibromyalgia situation) and the stress from that tips me over my limit and I still crash. It’s always a no win.

Anyways, my point is, one little thing (to someone else) can be the tipping point or the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and my fibromyalgia and stress capacity…and I get sent into days, weeks or even months of a flare up that I then have to work hard to “get back” from. (Again, I know you know!)

So can we limit it? Stress?

Well, we can certainly try to…try to limit our workload, our obligations, our contact with people and situations that we know cause us stress…IF we can. And there IS much we can do.  ‎But what about when we can’t? I mean, that would be great if we could always do that, but I certainly can’t…can anyone? Stressful life events happen to us…regardless of what we want, we can’t change that. And it’s often the people closest to us that ask of us to do those “tipping point” demands that cause us the overload of stress (of course…who else would it be?…it wouldn’t be a dilemma if it wasn’t someone we cared about). We can’t totally limit them…and we (really) don’t want to.

So what do we do?

Well, for myself, I want, as much as possible, a foolproof way to help insulate myself from as much stress as I can.

So, first and foremost I try NOT TO GET INVESTED IN THINGS I CAN’T CONTROL…that seems like a recipe for stress to me, to worry about things I can’t control…I work on the things I CAN control.

And I guess that’s why I look within. I look within to HOW I REACT to the stress that’s continually coming at me, especially even just the level of stress that trying to continue to live my life with the added burden that fibromyalgia brings.

That’s the one thing I CAN CONTROL…HOW I REACT.

So when my symptoms suddenly get worse or scary, it jolts me out of whatever often not really important thing (in the grand scale of life) was stressing me. It suddenly becomes “crystal” (as in crystal clear) to me that there’s nothing more important than my health, and I won’t let anything jeopardize it. And as soon as that realization becomes “crystal” to me again, the absolute top priority that my health is and that I won’t let anything stand in its way, I immediately CHANGE MY REACTION to whatever was going on…and the stress lifts…just like that…I actually feel lighter immediately…clearing the way for the symptoms to disappear.

The bottom line is always that nothing means anything without my health! If something’s standing in the way of my health, it’s got to go.

My health is like my permission to myself, to get out of any stress. Like a note from your Mom when you’re sick from school…”Please excuse ___ from stress as she is looking after her health.” Or my excuse to myself, to not have to worry…”Sorry I can’t have any stress, I’m watching my health.” Does that make sense?…it gives me the excuse to let myself off the hook from…stressing myself.

And to change my reaction, well, that’s easier than it seems, because I CHANGE WHAT I THINK first. I always realize that, more often than not, it’s not the actual circumstances or events going on in my life that are causing me the stress…the stress is coming from HOW I’M THINKING ABOUT THEM.

So in my usual stressed out “being overloaded” scenario, when I get jarred to the reality (with scary symptoms starting up) that I’m letting it stress me, and I take a good look at why, it’s always because I’m angry, frustrated or just “down” about being overloaded. And often, with my current life responsibilities, I haven’t been in a position to cut back on much. So (yes, I do this!) I just DECIDE I’m going to CHANGE MY THINKING to be happy(!) about being overloaded for the time being…I decide I will like(!) the hustle and bustle of a busy life and I will just change my attitude…and it’s done (and as the stress disappears, so too do the symptoms, sometimes right away, sometimes it takes a bit of time). My health is THAT important to me. Crystal.

But what about the huge never-ending stress that fibromyalgia itself brings? Well, I’ve definitely had to change my thinking to come up with ways to NOT be stressed about it as best I can…like to not be stressed about the sometimes downright scary life-affecting symptoms that crop up, because if they ARE caused by fibromyalgia, getting stressed will only make them worse and then I’m into THAT vicious cycle again.  So it’s times like that when I again change my thinking to “fake it ’til I make it” to lessen the stress so as not to worsen the symptoms and often this actually ends up making the symptoms totally disappear!

Yes, I admit, I just love to change what I think and suddenly my reality is changed too. It almost feels magical to me how it works. I can’t always control the stressful circumstances or event.

But I CAN control how I think about it and therefore how much power I give it to be able to stress me and therefore how I react as far as how much it actually stresses me.

Yes, that is definitely the key for me to dealing with stress…I may be able to reduce stress to some extent, but I surely can’t eliminate it, so I work on reducing (what it seems to me) its potentially very detrimental impact on myself and my fibromyalgia by altering my response to it.

So…crystal…magical…hmm…not the usual words when we’re talking fibromyalgia and stress. But, honestly, I feel THAT positive, even thinking about STRESS, which seems to me to be the main underlying factor affecting most, if not all(!), of my fibromyalgia symptoms…because I feel that I CAN do something about it.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to feel this…that I can do something that makes a difference!

And unmistakably, this IS something I can do…it’s something that we all can do…and what I know is real is that since I’ve realized this I seem to have more and more (and more!) control over my symptoms and subsequently my symptoms and flares are consistently getting less and less (and less!) over the years.

So. I have fibromyalgia. I work on stress.