Symptoms

I’ve been a health coach since 2014 and in that time I’ve mostly worked alongside people who experience ongoing, frustrating, painful symptoms.

There is something interesting I’ve noticed. Being a human, I’ve even seen it in myself. 

If you get a symptom once, or very occasionally, your awareness is briefly brought to it, and then you quickly forget it and go on with your life. It gets logged as a brief inconvenience and nothing more.

If however, you experience ongoing symptoms, chronic symptoms, painful symptoms, then very quickly, a background imagining begins to evolve. Your thinking starts to change and you might even begin to worry about your symptoms or conditions more often - even in times when they’re not present. As time passes, you might start to think about it more than anything else. Your ever-present worry thoughts might include beliefs like “this is never going to end”, “I’m going to have this forever”, “I’ll never be able to live a normal life”, “how can I go to work?” , “no one else will understand this”. 

But more importantly, more pressingly, is that those thoughts, those worry/fear/distress thoughts might actually cause your body to activate more of a stress response. We know that when the body is in a stressful state, healing is not the priority. From a coaching perspective, I want you to avoid that state where possible. I’m talking here about your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), aka fight, flight freeze or rest, digest, reproduce, repair.

If you listen to your thinking, you’re likely to feel worse, potentially stay unwell longer and often feel completely helpless and overwhelmed. Gah! I know, not what you wanted to hear. You already feel so overcome, you don’t need to feel ‘at fault’ for anything more. Just stay with me here.

One of the reasons people feel stuck is because we’ve been taught that healing happens quickly and linearly. But it doesn’t. The road back to health is fraught with variables, obstacles, unknowns, as well as those awesome accurate and meaningful targeted strategies that mean progress.

Meanwhile, you’re there, with your thoughts, perceptions and beliefs. And boy can they throw some shade on how you feel. Especially if you feel even just a bit better and then feel worse again (which very often can happen). You’ve told yourself you’re on the way up and out, so this decline can feel even worse than your original symptoms.

So whilst your practitioner goes about figuring out the physiological and biological origins of your symptoms or condition, as a coach, may I offer you a way out? This is not a magic cure, it’s a recipe for peace. 

Here ‘tis.

At all times, you are the one doing the thinking in your noggin. Noone else. Nobody can tell you what to think, how to think or when to think. You can choose your thinking, change your thinking and even challenge your thinking.

You may not have noticed any ‘doom thinking’. Maybe you’re not doing it, or maybe you are doing it and you didn’t notice that you had taken the slide into the pool of doom. 

Let me ask you:

When your symptoms are apparent, what do you think about them?

What do they mean to you?

What do they mean to your future?

How do you judge them?

What meaning do you give them?

The technique that will offer you freedom, should you be willing to put these floaties on and get out of the doom pool, is to be the observer of your symptoms, not the judge.

That is both easier and trickier than it sounds.

Easy because it is simply a thought.

Tricky because your existing thinking is the way you’ve programmed yourself to think - it's your go-to default. To change that will take intentional focus.

I’ll share some real examples so it makes a little more sense.

A few years ago I was coaching a lady who had a thyroid problem. She would be laying in bed and out of the blue her heart would suddenly thrust into her throat, pound in her chest, and race as if it had just merged spontaneously into the Gold Coast marathon.

When she told me about it I asked her how she felt when it happened. “Panic. It really scares me. My whole body feels anxious and I can’t go back to sleep. I worry that I’m going to die”.

This patient had already done investigations into heart function health as well as explored thyroid function and it was clinically determined that her racing heart was not from a faulty ticker, but rather a tricky thyroid. Because we knew this, it was safe to explore her thinking in those midnight moments when her heart raced.

The guidance was:

See if, when your heart races, you’re able to almost float above your body as the witness, the observer. Notice, without judging, what is happening. It might sound like “oh I notice my heart is going faster, I can see that it is rapid and there is a sensation in my throat. I trust my heart is doing everything it can to regulate. I notice that the pace is changing”. Really and honestly just noticing ‘what is’ - not what she perceived, not the extra meaning and ‘what else’, simply what is. (with the caveat that if it ever felt unsafe or unusual, go directly to hospital).

When we next spoke, she reported that she was able to do this. Of course it would take practice to lose the story and judgement, but what did happen when she simply observed was that the heart actually slowed down a lot quicker than it previously had. She had stopped giving the racing heart all of the meaning of ‘what else’.

Another woman I coached had ongoing bladder flares. They were very uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but more than the physical discomfort, she said that every time it happened her body went into a full panic. She was so scared that it couldn’t be cured and her professional life was in jeopardy, that every time she got a twinge, her body went immediately to panic stations and high alert.

When I asked her to imagine her bladder and describe it, she used words like “red, angry, with a poker it uses to jab me”. In her experience, and according to what she was believing, her bladder wasn’t quietly betraying her, it was her enemy.

We spent time exploring her thinking and reactions when she got any bladder symptoms. Once she realised that by changing her thinking and knowing she had some strategies, she felt a lot calmer and when she had a bladder twinge, it was much less impactful. But more compelling, more assuring than that, were the mini meditations we’d do. If she was experiencing discomfort during a call, I would guide her through a meditation. We would visualise the bladder being calm, blue, relaxed, lots of healthy energy flow and ease. By the end of a short meditation, her symptoms were gone - every time.

To be absolutely, undoubtedly clear with you, I am not suggesting you ‘think your way’ out of illness. Not at all. That’s just silly. What I do invite is an audit of your current thinking, the meaning you give your symptoms and then that observer lens that holds no judgement. 

Is there an opportunity for you to change how you’re experiencing those symptoms (and please don’t call them “my” symptoms, “my thyroid condition” or “my bladder condition” - they do not belong to you)? 

If you see them and don’t build a story around them, do they change or does your experience of them change?

I propose that how we think is how we experience the world. 

Pain is painful. That is true. Pain plus a story can feel insurmountable. That is also true. What are you willing to let go of and change in order to change your experience?

If you’re interested in techniques for getting out of stressful thinking, I adore The Work by Byron Katie.

If you want to impact your physiology through thought (supported by science) check out Dr Joe Dispenza.