Finding your rhythm

Diaphragmatic breathing Day 3/4

It’s important to practice your breathing every day. This is a key skill to taking control of your symptoms.

Disobeying Unhelpful Thoughts

In your Disobeying your Unhelpful Thoughts Journal, provided in your onboarding materials, write down an unhelpful thought you’d like to disobey today. Write out what values you’ll be honoring when you disobey it. At the end of the day, mark if you completed it. If it’s hard to think about what values you’ll be honoring, that’s okay. Just focus on disobeying the thought and notice what that’s like for you after you’ve done it. If it’s hard to choose a thought, that’s okay too. Just commit to doing this once a day and you can log it in your journal after you’ve disobeyed it.

Overdoing it and underdoing it

Last time, we talked about pacing. When you have a chronic pain condition, it can be tricky to know how much to do on any given day. On a good day, it’s tempting to be extra productive and try to catch up, especially if you’ve had some bad days recently. But if you do too much, you may have more pain, fatigue, and brain fog. It can be a vicious cycle. It’s also possible to get caught in a spiral of worrying about symptoms, avoiding activities, having more pain or fatigue, and then worrying more and avoiding things more. Pacing is one of the biggest challenges that comes with living with a chronic pain condition. So this time, we’ll take a closer look at the issue. We want to help you strike a balance between overdoing it and underdoing it.