🟢 5 mental shifts that saved my (physical) life
In my twenties, I felt like I was in my 90s when my body worsened rather than recovered after a collision. How I cured 31 symptoms that stumped doctors.
(3.5 min read)
Perhaps you remember my post from last month:
A friend recommended that I write a follow-up about how I cured 31 symptoms that had stumped doctors.
Here is Part 2.
1. No one will save you.
Before the injury and its terrible aftermath, my default assumption was that doctors (and other professionals in general) know what they’re doing and that you should trust them.
But I’d visited so many (doctors, osteopaths, surgeons, physical therapists, massage therapists, etc.), and their advice had not helped me.
It became clear to my partner Katie and me that we needed to take full responsibility for my recovery.
We could check in with professionals, but we couldn’t rely on them.
Think about incentives.
Doctors (at least in the USA) are not incentivized to help you get healthy and strong, and they are not even incentivized to learn.
Whenever they say “In my experience, when a patient does ______, the outcome is ______”, it’s generally bullshit.
How do I know?
Because in 40 years, I’ve never had a doctor follow up and ask about any outcomes.
They do NOT have reliable data.
Be skeptical.
Be curious.
Be open-minded.
Do your own research.
2. Your mind and body are one mindbody.
Your thoughts affect how your body behaves.
What symptoms you experience.
This is obvious in retrospect.
But it had never occurred to me.
Simple examples from everyday life:
Embarrassing thoughts can cause blushing
Thrilling thoughts can cause goosebumps
Disturbing thoughts can cause feelings of nausea and vomiting
Anxious thoughts can lead to sweating
Fearful thoughts can cause trembling
Erotic thoughts can lead to erections
Imagine driving. You make a dicey U-turn, or maybe you’re going too fast.
Suddenly you see blue flashing lights in your rear-view mirror.
What do you feel in your stomach?
Butterflies, or worse.
Although I was familiar with these mindbody interactions, it hadn’t occurred to me that I ought to be very intentional with my thoughts in order for my body to feel and behave how I want.
Your thoughts affect recovery from injury or illness.
And can help you continually push the envelope of what “feeling your best” means.
3. Eventually, if you’ve ruled out physical root causes, you should pretend you’re not in pain.
The books I read back then (first by Dr. John Sarno) proposed:
If you’ve been worried that there is a physical root cause to your symptoms, you can try following the advice of doctors about how to resolve it.
But if their advice doesn’t help, shouldn’t you be open-minded to the possibility that their assumption of the physical root cause is wrong?
At that point, consider brute forcing through pain to resume your usual activities.
In my case, this meant that I should get rid of my expensive ergonomic equipment and just use my old computer setup.
And go on long walks, forcing myself not to limp (or use crutches), even if it hurt.
Trust that the pain signals from my brain were mistaken.
Trust that those erroneous painful “notifications” would eventually cease, but the way to disable them is to resume normal activities despite their warnings.
I was only willing to do this because I’d hit rock bottom.
I was desperate and was at the point that I’d try anything.
4. Emotional awareness matters more than you’d think.
psychosomatic (adjective): of or relating to a physical disorder that is caused by or notably influenced by emotional factors.
The original books that introduced me to the possibility that my pain was psychosomatic hypothesize that its readers had repressed childhood rage.
As much as I searched, I couldn’t find any bottled-up childhood fury.
Yet I cured myself anyway.
Because the books at least made me explore my emotions.
alexithymia (noun): difficulty in experiencing, expressing, and describing emotional responses.
I’d been emotionally oblivious.
On any given day, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that I felt anything other than “good” or “bad”.
I lacked the vocabulary (and insight) about the many varieties of emotions that we all experience.
So I printed out lists of emotion adjectives and also this wheel of emotion nouns:
Journaling (and using emotional words) can help.
But even with therapy and journaling, I still struggled to achieve a moment-to-moment awareness of what I felt emotionally.
And I now think that my body then surfaced physical symptoms to compensate.1
Finally, I came up with a trick that worked:
I imagined that a friend was watching a livestream of my life via a camera in the top corner of the room.
What emotions might the friend assume I was experiencing in each moment?
What would be reasonable guesses?
Once I started asking myself this “third person” question, my symptoms dissipated.
5. Assume you’re strong and resilient rather than weak and fragile.
Waking up, I stretch my body and acknowledge some aches.
Must be something I did yesterday.— Jason Mraz in “Hello, You Beautiful Thing”
Every day, people experience mysterious pains and other symptoms.
They then usually attribute the pain to some recent physical behavior of theirs.
Just like the Jason Mraz song.
I now know this to be the wrong default assumption.
Any time you don’t feel strong and resilient, assume there could be an emotional root cause.
Just because you have physical symptoms does not always mean that there is a physical root cause.
Ever since learning about mindbody interaction, I always ask myself about my emotions and how they might be impacting my body.
I’m still not 100% sure that we’ll live forever.
But in the meantime, the closest you can get to feeling invincible is to understand the power that you mind and body have working together.
🕙 What we learned in recent posts:
🟢 Risky
👀 Caught my eye this week:
The robots are coming.
Imagine machines with this dexterity and “brains” that get vastly upgraded every month (ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT 6, and so on...)
💬 Conversation starter:
What interesting mindbody relationships have you noticed in your life?
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In other words, I don’t think your childhood necessarily has anything to do with your psychosomatic symptoms today.
I think your present-day suppression of (or obliviousness to) your emotions is much more likely.
And by the way, whether or not you outwardly express your emotions is irrelevant.
What matters is just whether you acknowledge and identify them (which you can do privately).
Currently reading ‘When the Body Says No’ by Gabor Mate.
Wow.
What an eye opener about the mind-body-link and the role of stressors in your early life.
Highly recommended book to read and reflect upon.
The lady who created the exercise routine system I follow talks about pain loops forming that make us feel pain even after the physical injury has healed.