In Your Face, Fibromyalgia…I “Do the Opposite”!

So bear with me because I know this may sound, well, just plain backasswards, but there’s three little words that keep popping into my head over the years as I occasionally ponder this seeming battle of wits I’ve been forced into to try to stay afloat and functioning in life with fibromyalgia. No, it’s not “I love you” fibromyalgia, ha!

It’s “DO THE OPPOSITE”!

Because really, it seems to me that fibromyalgia is a “do-the-opposite” illness. I mean, you kind of HAVE to be oppositional, even defiant, to tackle it!

Yes, if you’re oppositional, defiant…then maybe this is the illness for you. If you’re a REBEL, this is the illness for you!

You’ve definitely got to have a little contrariness going on, a little “in your face” kind of attitude.

Well, I know I’ve had to anyways.

So let me explain.

The thing is, I’ve found having fibromyalgia, I often have to “do the opposite” of what my instincts and logic would dictate, what ANY regular person’s (who doesn’t have fibromyalgia) instincts and logic would dictate!

For example, what does one usually want to do when they’re tired? What makes sense to do? Sleep more, obviously. But I’ve found I can’t.

I have to…you guessed it…“do the opposite”!

Because of the chronic fatigue  that goes with my fibromyalgia, I find most mornings I wake up feeling overwhelmingly tired, like I need loads more sleep (I know you know!), but honestly, experience has taught me that once I force, kick and drag myself out of bed and push myself to get going on with my day, I’m sure I feel better on the days when I had six and a half to seven hours of sleep than when I had lots more! Once I get through that initial fibromyalgia morning “malaise”, I feel more “normal”, less achy to move around, more energy to get through the day and less overall symptoms throughout the day.

Yes, I need to listen to my body and get a decent amount of sleep (of course!) but I find if I go too much over that “optimal” sleep range that I talked about in an earlier post or just lie around too much, I get MORE sluggish, lethargic and fatigued. And I’ve come to realize that I’m not sure that I COULD sleep that well at night if I didn’t “do the opposite” and often drag myself through my days and besides a nap here and there on a flare day, resist the urge (that logic dictates when one is this chronically fatigued!) to just go to bed and sleep 24/7 as my tiredness seems to be indicating I need to do.

Nope…I get a little defiant…I “do the opposite”…AND I FUNCTION BETTER!

And speaking of 24/7 and fibromyalgia, that brings me to…aches and pains! What does one usually want to do when they’re stiff and sore and aching? What’s the logical thing to do? Well, of course, logic would dictate (and in most cases, regular people would!)…sit down somewhere, right? Rest your body. Be still. Of course!

But nooooo! Experience has taught me, I have to…yup, “do the opposite”! When aches start to set in and my body gets stiff…I move more. The achier and stiffer I get, the more I move.

Yes, experience (of living with fibromyalgia for over seventeen years now) has taught me to be very conscious of moving in my everyday life. I keep moving, using my muscles, and not just when I’m working out (which I do regularly) but I mean in simply moving around in everyday life. Bending up and down doing household chores, climbing up on stools to reach high kitchen cupboards, climbing up and down my basement stairs sometimes countless times a day, outdoor work all summer, even out doing basic errands, walking around stores…whatever I need to do I’m conscious to fully, deliberately, put my body into it and get the movement benefit from it as much as possible.

Because basically, I’ve found movement makes my fibromyalgia aches and stiffness go away.

And I can’t think of a better example of this than first thing every morning…getting up with my fibromyalgia body, aching somewhere (at times everywhere!), hobbling out of bed on stiffened feet, sometimes my body hijacked by the full “walking corpse” persona (that’s a real picnic!). Raising a family the entire seventeen years I’ve had fibromyalgia, I’ve always had to get up and get moving fast in the mornings (like get out of bed and get doing things immediately!), and I’ve found that although it’s excruciatingly(!) difficult to get started…THE ACHES AND PAINS GO AWAY FASTER WITH THE MOVEMENT…actually quite fast. I find it’s quite comparable to pulling off a band aid fast, if I just force myself to get up and get to it quickly, the pain is over much quicker.

Now I’m not saying I don’t pace myself and rest when I need to (I do!) and I’ve chatted a lot about that in a previous post but I kind of like to have the phrase “remain in motion” swirling around in my head as I go about my day as a little reminder to “do the opposite” when I’m stiff and aching and all sensibilities (for regular people) would dictate I should stop moving.

No…“in your face” fibromyalgia…I move more!

And this really hits home when I’ve missed my workouts for a week or so through the Christmas holidays or maybe a vacation…I’ll notice my aches are gradually worsening and I’ll be much more lethargic. As I titled an earlier post about exercise and fibromyalgia, at this point “Any sane person would have went and lied down somewhere”! Well, over a decade and a half of experience has now taught me to exercise a little contrariness instead and “do-the-opposite”. I climb on my treadmill and make myself workout and almost immediately, my aches begin to lessen and my energy level starts coming back.

So last Christmas I had a chance to do a little anecdotal experiment and carefully test out my “do the opposite” with a deep nagging pain I was having. My hip had been feeling like a badly pulled muscle, from the top of my leg, deep inside the hip joint, and shooting deep down the outside of my leg to my knee. I was limping around for a couple of days, in a fair amount of pain whenever I moved it. (Logic would dictate don’t move it!)

I had good reason to think it was from fibromyalgia, the stress and lack of sleep of overdoing it through the  Christmas season…I did feel rougher and achier than normal overall…and then this hip thing kicks in…I couldn’t think of any time that I had injured it….so, I figured it was likely fibromyalgia. The one morning I climbed up on a high stool in my kitchen to reach a top shelf and I noticed my leg was able to support my weight as I hoisted my body up, no problem…again, seems like fibromyalgia. And then, when I was able to get a better night’s sleep and woke up to find it considerably improved…another good indication it was fibromyalgia.

In my mind, from my experience, I already knew it was from fibromyalgia. So I decided to try my regular high intensity interval workout on my treadmill. Oh, I’d be very cautious and careful, especially at first.

Funny thing is, if this was before I had fibromyalgia, I wouldn’t be working out at all.

I’d take some time completely off workouts to let it heal. In fact, I had even planned to take this particular week off over Christmas for a workout break, but now, BECAUSE of my leg, I needed to “do the opposite”…I decided to try a workout. If the “injury” was from fibromyalgia, I was wondering if a workout would “heal” it. Also, I realized that if it was my fibromyalgia getting worse from not doing my regular routines over the holidays, of which working out is a big part, I should get on top of this sooner while I still can. I’m always pretty wary of letting anything go for too long and ending up in a vicious downward spiral (you know it, a flare).

So I knew doing the workout itself, any workout, much less my high intensity interval workout was going to be an extra challenge‎ because I had let up on my regular routine and just fit in sparse workouts the last few weeks in an effort to not overdo it with all the extra Christmas activities. I cautiously climbed on my treadmill, to try to start to get back to my previous level and ease, each time never quite sure when things might go too far and ‎I may not be able to “get back” (so far, in over seventeen years, I’ve always been able to!).

Immediately I could tell the leg was good to go!

It held my weight no problem…and NO PAIN AT ALL. It held through the entire‎ forty-six minute high intensity workout! In fact, the only pain that I had was in the other leg, that fake pulled muscle thing I described in an earlier post that I sometimes briefly get when I’ve missed a bit of workouts and am starting up again.

So there you have it! My leg felt like a severely pulled muscle…logic and common sense would dictate I stay off it, rest it, let it heal…that’s what any regular person would do…but I know from experience, I’m not a regular person anymore…no, I need to “do the opposite”, and…it worked! My leg felt fine again after that.

Experiment completed! Oppositional attitude…grade A!!

But you know, this little experiment leads me to another typical fibromyalgia situation where I always need to “do the opposite” of what my mind is hell bent on doing! And it’s not easy at all.

It’s my reaction to a stressor, any stressor really, but I’ll use my fibromyalgia symptoms again as a prime example since, regardless of whether they are old familiar symptoms or random new symptoms, there’s ALWAYS a level of anxiety and stress that comes with them…either from the physicality of the symptoms, or the frustration of being sick and having to function in life still, or the frustration of having to get through yet another flare AGAIN (when can I catch a break?) or worse yet, the anxiety of wondering if maybe this is not “just fibromyalgia” and something far more ominous is looming, causing these particular symptoms…and most likely, it’s all of the above!

So when my fibromyalgia symptoms start to flare up (or any other stressor), I instinctively start to get frustrated, worried, upset sometimes…initially, of course I start to stress.

HOWEVER, seventeen years of living with fibromyalgia has taught me, that above all else, stress is the kryptonite to my fibromyalgia…it’s a leading (arguably “the” leading) trigger for my symptoms.

So, you guessed it, I’ve found I have to really dig deep for all the oppositionality I can muster…I have to “do the opposite”…I have to try to stop myself from my instinctive reaction of getting stressed…in fact it’s highly likely that stress is the cause of the symptoms in the first place and if I react with even more stress, well, you know the vicious circle and severe flare I will end up spiralling into. So here’s where my many little mind tricks that I’ve talked about in previous posts come in, faking it ’til I make it by changing what I think to help me be positive and take the stress off.

Oh, that’s all! (insert eye roll here) Sounds so simple when I say it like that! (she said sarcastically) It’s not simple…it’s hard to not stress in the face of actual stressful events.

(“In your face”, stress!)

Just as hard is trying to not be depressed while living with fibromyalgia. Let’s face it, when one feels like crap, we tend to feel “down” mentally as well…it’s just natural…anyone does…everyone does!

But noooo…after all these years living with fibromyalgia…I’ve found I have to…you know it…“do the opposite”.

Slowly but surely, it gradually became apparent over the years that while I’m dragging and pushing myself through my fibromyalgia life of forever fatigue and a constant and ever changing range of annoying to downright scary pains and symptoms, I have to do whatever it takes to pull my mind up, lift myself up, find a silver lining, find some hope…anything to feel positive because a “down” mental day adds stress…remember?…kryptonite.

I had even already begun to sense this through my earlier fibromyalgia years when I was experiencing mild depression…I would tie my hope to anything, lots of little everyday things in life, anything with my kids, an inspiring book, anything I could find a glimpse of positive in, one day at a time…until I was strong enough for my hope to be anchored within me once again.

But yes, it seems to me that this needing to “do the opposite” aspect of fibromyalgia is what makes it so complicated to live with.

Fibromyalgia lends itself to vicious circle after vicious circle; it often feels like there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it…”doing the opposite” has helped me to break those vicious circles and for some time now, to even avoid getting into them in the first place.

I often think it’s no wonder many with fibromyalgia have the experience of gradually declining…HOW WOULD ANYONE KNOW TO GO AGAINST LOGIC AND COMMON SENSE!? It took me years of trial and error living with fibromyalgia, to gradually learn I had to frequently go against what common sense would dictate and even against my own instincts at times!

And I kind of lucked out to realize this in a lot of respects…although I will admit I do have a natural propensity to a little defiance, my life when I first had fibromyalgia didn’t allow me to do the logical things; my circumstances of raising three young children on my own so much of the time, dictated that I absolutely and regularly force myself to “do the opposite” of what I most often felt like doing…and as tough as that was, I very gradually learned this was a good thing, a very good thing.

It’s not that I don’t have a healthy respect for fibromyalgia (I do!)…it’s not that we shouldn’t listen to our bodies and react and pace accordingly (we should!)…fibromyalgia can and will wreak absolute devastation on our lives. It’s like walking a tightrope, trying to find the balance of it all and trying to find our OWN way to balance our OWN circumstances.

 And yes, fibromyalgia certainly likes to (try to) keep slapping us back down again and “keep us in our place” when we step off our fibromyalgia “tightrope”…but we can’t let that place be nonexistent.

I won’t let it be nonexistent.

So I’m starting to think maybe it’s a good thing I’ve got a streak of obstinance…predisposed to “do the opposite”…a fibromyalgia rebel so to speak. Yes, this is definitely the illness for us rebels!

What I know is real is it has served me well so far…a little contrariness here, a little defiance there…seventeen years and I’m still standing.

So yeah…in your face, fibromyalgia!