Tag: mental-health

Rating Our Health

I was at the doctor’s office with a form asking me to rate my health from poor to excellent. That’s always a tricky one.

The obvious choice to me is excellent. But then I wonder what the doctor would think. I have a couple of “conditions” which might suggest otherwise.

  • High blood pressure since I was pregnant with Hunter, my fifth born son who turns 30 this year

  • High cholesterol and a scan confirming I have a bit of arterial build up
  • Ten years of living with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease involving a lot of pain and a long healing process. And many life changes.
  • Osteoporosis, which the doctor said requires drugs. “You’re a small framed older white woman. It is inevitable,” she said.
  • Three melanoma moles, gratefully discovered early and removed. Thank you New Jersey shore and baby oil.

Knowing those conditions would be revealed on the form, I still checked “excellent.” 

When I check excellent, I do it because I am the one that gets to decide what my health looks like. Not the doctors, not the labs, not the test results. I get to decide.

I definitely have not ignored doctors, labs, or test results. On the contrary, I have taken each one very seriously.  But I recognize the responsibility I have to be involved in my healing process.

It’s certainly not the case I have it all figured out. Or that I won’t be affected by any of them. Or that I’m never in fear about them. I just want to be assured that I have done the best I could with the one body I have been given.

Getting older takes a lot of work. It might be “easier” if we just let life happen and accept aches and pains and conditions as part of it all. But my philosophy is to believe we don’t just get older, we also get wiser. 

I’m going to be looking at what I’ve learned from each condition, beginning with bone health and muscle loss. If there is one person that can benefit from this, it’s worth putting it out there. There are principles that apply to more than just a diagnosis. They apply to life.

Older and wiser. That’s our portion. Let’s lean into it.

Anxious Thoughts

Anxious thoughts take up a lot of space, and we can find ourselves dealing with these thoughts more than we like. There’s no magic potion that releases all anxiety, but anything that can alleviate the anxious monkey mind is welcome.

Sometimes we don’t know why we’re having anxious thoughts. It’s helpful to stop and acknowledge that they’re there, having a quasi conversation with them. “Ok, I hear you, you’re fussing about something. If you’re just in a creative mode, coming up with scenarios and what ifs, I don’t have time for that. And if it’s more, there’s nothing I can do right now. I’m going to let you you figure that out.”

If the anxiety is high, we can try to divert our thoughts. It could be a book, or music, or games on the phone. It could be a walk or some form of creative endeavor. After we step back for a while, sometimes it’s easier to see the core of the anxious thought.

Oh yeah, that. So often there’s nothing we can do about the root cause of the anxiety. But our goal when anxious thoughts arise isn’t to whack away at the root; it’s to calm our nervous system, even if just a notch.

When I’m on my game, I will stop and breathe deeply. I whisper, “This moment, not that one.” It helps when I say “this moment” as I breathe in. Breathing out I whisper “not that one,” and visualize the anxious thought dissipating. The present moment always contains some stillness that I can tap into until my body begins to soften.

The antidote for truly calming anxious thoughts is generally not an action step. After we get our minds to settle a bit, it’s generally the opposite. This moment, I can breathe deeply, I can allow gratitude and kindness to seep in, I can pray. The most we can do often looks like nothing.

So we get still and breathe deeply. Whatever is causing our anxiety will likely still be there. Our goal isn’t to dissolve the cause, it’s to quiet our nervous system. It’s a practice we learn, and if there’s a lot going on, we learn it over and over all day long.

“THIS moment, not that one.”