Developing a Healthy mindset

My patients generally suffer from chronic pain or chronic illness and it is from this perspective that I am writing on this topic.

Developing a Healthy mindset

How having a positive attitude improves your health outcomes.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but when faced with significant life changes as a result of illness or injury, generally positive people may experience a crisis of faith due to the uncertainty caused by their illness or injury.

A healthy mindset will help you achieve the health you desire, by putting you in charge of your own health. Dealing with illness or injury is a strain on any person. Having the proper viewpoint, realistic expectations, self-compassion and maintaining consistency will help you achieve the results you desire.

While it can be argued that your mindset has no effect on treatment outcome, it does have an affect on behavior. A healthy mindset may drive someone to complete a treatment course and do the work outside of treatment. Those behaviors definitely affect outcomes.

Viewpoint

How you perceive your illness or injury can affect outcome. It is usual to view health issues as negative, or a detriment, while it may actually be an opportunity.

I’ve attended a few lectures given by Jeffrey Yuen. He is a Daoist priest and Chinese Medicine practitioner. He believes that pathology or disease is the universe’s way of motivating you to achieve your potential or become who you’re supposed to be. (I’m paraphrasing) In essence, ‘here is an opportunity to improve yourself.’

I’ve seen patients re-evaluate their life because of their illness or injury and work to be healthier than before their illness or injury.

Here is an example of someone who had an indomitable spirit. I had a patient who was a Holocaust survivor. He told me that he was at Auschwitz working on railroad construction. One day, a rail section fell on his foot, breaking it. He was put in a rail car with the other injured men. They only received a small daily ration of bread, but if you didn’t work, you weren’t fed. His friends would break off a piece of their meager ration to share with him. He said he would have died, but luckily, he broke is foot 2 weeks before the war ended and he was liberated from the concentration camp.

Every time he walked into my office, he had a smile on his face and he told me a joke. This is how he interacted with everyone. He viewed every day as a gift and never let anything get him down. He owned a hardware store in Baltimore and was known and admired in his neighborhood. He chose to be this way.

Expectation

Being realistic in your expectations and being able to adjust those expectations is part of a healthy mindset.

For example: If you go to the MVA to renew your drivers license, expecting to be in and out in 10 minutes, but end up there for over an hour, your attitude will definitely deteriorate. But if you can adjust your expectation, perhaps strike up a conversation with someone next to you in line, you can improve that situation.

I’ve had patients who were post-surgical for a lower spine condition and were told recovery would be 6-8 weeks. When that time passes and they’re not able to get back on the golf course with a full power swing, they’re severely disappointed. When they bring this up at the surgical follow-up, the doctor then says, “oh, it can take up to a year for you to feel better.”

Health outcomes are impossible to predict. Complications may arise, delaying progress. Additional conditions may be diagnosed, complicating your treatment. Also, we’re all individuals and may respond to treatment differently.

The ability to adjust expectations can mitigate disappointment.

Self-compassion

No one can be sunshine and happy all the time. Everyone faces challenges that will test their mettle.

When you start a treatment course, you won’t get better every day. There will be set backs. You will have good days and bad. I don’t measure patient progress from visit to visit. I generally see them twice per week and likely nothing changes. But if we can measure some improvement over the course of a month or 6 months, that is significant. In many cases, the problems that people present take years to develop. Turning them around in a few months or even a year is a triumph.

As part of treatment, you will have to do some work. You may need to eat differently, be better hydrated, have better sleep habits, stretch or exercise more. Developing these habits takes time, and you may be inconsistent. That’s OK. Don’t be so critical of yourself. Try your best.

Consistency

When my son was younger, he would complain that tasks were ‘too hard.’ So I posed him this riddle, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer, “One bite at a time.”

As humans, we program or re-program ourselves through repetition and consistency. Small daily achievements become big leaps forward which builds self confidence and a healthy attitude.

To be good at something, whatever that is, requires working on it consistently, whether daily or weekly, it requires effort and repetition. Your health is no different. If you have illness or injury, become good at healing yourself, become an expert on your own health.

To achieve the health you desire, you need to be an active participant. You can’t achieve this when things are simply done to you.

With a healthy mindset, you can alleviate some of the uncertainty and stress of dealing with illness or injury and achieve the health you desire.