Recently I have found it really tough trying to deal with everyday life and my asthma together. It felt like a full-time job just staying well, making sure I took all my treatment etc and then live life too. It was just way too much physically and mentally.
When dealing with physical health troubles there is so much we push ourselves to do and can often end up pushing ourselves too far because you have that spell of feeling well so everything gets crammed into that small window of time with no care for how you will feel after. This is something I am very guilty of. I will feel well so do everything and anything just like others do. And I feel great doing it. The adrenaline rush of being with friends and just being out and about leaves you feeling on a high and part of “normal” society. Soon after you crash back to earth with a bang.
I find the bang leaves me focusing on all the negatives about what I now can’t do rather than all I have done to end up in such a situation. I find I can’t rationalise sometimes that I did all this good stuff and that is why I feel crap. I think the other way round. I feel crap so now I can’t do what I want to do.
It is a cycle of peaks and troughs with each peak getting that little bit smaller and the trough getting that little bit bigger.
I realised this was not helping me physically or mentally. I went to see a psychologist who specialises in dealing with people with long term health conditions. He actually wrote my anticipatory care plan for when in hospital so know him already and had a good rapport so was looking forward to the appointment.
I went in with a plan of what I wanted to discuss and what I wanted to achieve. Something I was told not to do as I would then set myself up for not achieving goals I set myself but anyway do I ever listen…it seems no!
I took loads from the appointment but 2 things really helped an can be put to use straight away but may take some practice before I get it right.
The first was to allow me to be kind to myself. It took me a while to understand this but after explaining about how people have a part of their brain which determines their drive and another part which allows them to be kind to self I could see where I was going wrong.
From my background of playing sport and being very competitive with it I am very driven. I want to succeed at the best I can, I won’t quit until I reached a goal. I do this in all parts of my life. I will drive and drive and keeping pushing to be the best and achieve the best. In some settings this is good- particularly sport but in health this is not good and its not doing me any favours. I do not allow kindness to self. I tried to argue with the idea that I did and this was when I took a break in a day and rested but this was not what he was meaning. He descried it as lifting my foot off the pedal and applying the break a little bit. I see resting now as something I have to do because if I don’t I will fail at what I want- but in doing this I am not actually resting my body as I am driving myself to rest. I need to accept that my body won’t do all I want it to do but if I allow myself time, rest and recovery I will be able to do more and more often rather than fitting everything in in a short space of time like I do just now!
I have put this in practice already by planning my week better and having evenings I call rest evenings where I go to bed earlier than usual and read my book and try to switch off. I have also planned my weekends to allow myself more time to rest for the week but still doing somethings for example I have a awards dinner on Friday night and lacrosse on saturday afternoon (not sure how much I will play but it still counts), so for Sunday I have planned to spend the morning getting ready for the week and the afternoon watching a film and just chilling out. Have a really good dinner and be ready for the next week. I am not sure how this will go but I hope that I may feel good for it. Time will tell.
The other thing we discussed a lot was about CONTROL. Being a naturally driven person I like to have control in my life and control of my life. I like to have my destiny in my hands and therefore my future dictated by my decisions. This is something I don’t have and have not had for a long time. In the asthma world so to speak to word control is all over the place- mainly when discussing how stable or unstable your asthma is and how much control or lack of you have, we do the asthma control test again to check control. It feels I can never get away from it yet strive to have it all the time.
I desperately want control of my asthma so I can live my life without fear of attacks, or fear of losing my job, without dealing with medications, side effects of medication, not having to go to numerous hospital appointments throughout the year. It would be so great to say I had control. Instead of telling everyone I am trying to get control but not there yet. It often feels I have no control over it. There is no prediction to when I may or may not have an attack, I cannot control the uncontrollable such as external factors like cigarette smoke, pollen, building works. I can’t even really control my medication. The only control I do have is about taking my medication. I control when I take it but other than that there is not much.
I need to work on not needing to have control. And rationalise that there are something you can’t control but to focus on controlling what I can. In doing this I won’t set myself up for failures and frustration when I don’t get to where I want to. By planning my time better I am controlling when I can do things and when I can’t rather than having to listen to when my body has had enough and stop. By planning things and get a good balance I hope I won’t go back to the ways of filling my good days with loads and then suffering after.
Only time will tell if these things work or not but fingers crossed they do!
ANONYMOUS-ASTHMA 