By Toni Bernhard J.D. — 2018
New ideas for living well, even if our health is less than ideal.
Read on www.psychologytoday.com
CLEAR ALL
With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”
If you have a chronic illness, you may know what it feels like to be a “full-time patient.
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It pays to organize your approach to heart disease or any chronic medical problem.
If someone were to ask you what the hardest part of living with chronic illness is, they might expect you to respond with one of the physical symptoms you experience, or perhaps how this symptom affects your ability to do certain activities.
People are forever extolling the virtues of meditation, but who wants to focus on their breath or body when they’ve got a runny nose or aching bones? Even those who are sold on the mindfulness practice might be inclined to skip sessions when feeling under the weather.
If you are like the millions of Americans who have a chronic illness (a disease like fibromyalgia, diabetes, or MS that often has no cure and requires ongoing treatment), you're probably well-familiar with the medical side of your illness.
Individuals with disabilities are at a greater risk of experiencing fatigue than the general population, and this risk increases with age.
After 15 years of chronic illness and even after writing a book titled How to Be Sick, I still can feel sick of being sick. (When I use the word “sick,” I’m including chronic pain.) If you’re as intimately familiar as I am with sick of being sick, you know how unpleasant it feels.
To celebrate the release of my new book, How To Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide, I’ve made a list of 20 tips to help with the health challenges all us face at one time or another in life.
In the end, I fall back on one statement that I repeat to myself pretty often. “We are not given the burdens we deserve, we are given the burdens we can bear.”
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