For so many of us who find ourselves facing a new chapter in our lives with a disability, the challenges that come along with it can range between small and immense. Despite this collision with fate, a little ingenuity and awareness help us discover we can succeed in overcoming setbacks. Our efforts to reach a better place are never fruitless.
In this latest blog, I offer 7 steps to assist in achieving inner peace. Refer to these steps to create an awareness and set goals to maintain your calmness as you heal and find your way forward.
1. Find Rest
Rest is probably the most important component of healing, yet the one component that’s so hard to find and maintain. There’s an inner grief and anxiety that pulls at us in the beginning stages of a traumatic injury or disability as we attempt to rationalize our current circumstances along with where we were in our lives before our trauma occurred and our lives changed. It’s easy to find ourselves in an angry or unhappy place. Your life was more than likely following a carefully planned course, or maybe you were comfortably nestled into a well-established routine before unplanned chaos intervened. Now that your original course has been altered, it’s time to set it aside for now so you can focus on healing. Rest and recuperation is now your full-time job for the foreseeable future. One way to achieve this calmness within is to start the process of letting go and telling yourself it’s ok to do so as you reset your priorities.
In other words, try to set time aside. The alternative is rushing, which means you’re holding onto what you had before. Rushed efforts are never best efforts. All that matters now is the present and looking forward as you heal, which encourages acceptance and a calm, inner peace to begin.
2. Find Quiet
Noise causes fatigue. Remove anything that causes loud noise and the startle effect. There are many everyday sources that unexpectedly cause this type of stress, like raised voices, children screaming, colliding pots and pans, loud TV commercials, or traffic noises. Areas outside of the home like restaurants can also be too much to process thanks to background noises of other conversations in a confined space. Because your brain is focused on your trauma and all it takes to facilitate your ability to move, less noise means less anxiety and stress.
Simply put, give yourself permission to find quiet time and space. Express this need to others around you, and consider implementing stretches of time each day where volume levels are significantly decreased. Quiet time can make you re-centered, recharged, and ready for what comes next.
3. Find Your Limits
Learn to listen to your body. It’s obviously traumatized in the beginning from whatever occurred. Your brain and your body are two separate entities that are more than likely not working in sync in their attempts to heal. Both need to rediscover how to talk to each other so they can work in unison once again. While all this is going on, both are victims to your Sympathetic nervous system where fight or flight occur. With a trauma, it’s almost guaranteed that fight and flight are in complete overdrive, which means anxiety is never far behind. Your brain and body also deal with medication supplied by your physicians, and naturally the medication side effects. As a result, you can find your body fatigued, your system overextended, and your mind in unfamiliar territory. You may find that you’re attaching limits from your “before” self to your current self.
Remember: it’s important to listen and pay attention to your current capabilities. Find and acknowledge your new limits so you can pace yourself and maximize your recovery process.
4. Find Your Pace
Pace yourself! Prior to a traumatic setback, it was probably easy to work a 12 hour day or find yourself awake for 16 to 18 hours. Yet, after a trauma you may find you’re only capable of being awake for four hours. Your body may say, “Hey, I’m good with energy for an entire day!” but your brain is signaling something entirely different. The objective here is to listen closely. When your body and brain are saying “I’m tired!” that’s your message not to push and to stop. Pushing against these indicators tends to lead toward your daily fuel tank running out unexpectedly, and quite possibly affecting your abilities the following day.
Therefore, learn moderation. If you find you’re exhausted beyond belief at the end of each day — or if you wake up exhausted the next morning — reassess your schedule. Course-correction is not the enemy of progress. Poor pacing is!
5. Remove Your Threats
When your home, threats that impede your ability to maintaining your contentment are abundant. Your balance, position in space, how you shift, reach, step, push, pull, and move your head so your body doesn’t follow and fall are continuous concerns: you’re always one careless moment away from getting hurt. Therefore, obstacles around the house that interfere with your safety, cause questions, or create any level of anxiety should be dealt with.
Re-evaluate your house and where you spend your time regularly for threats. A constant vigilance is mandatory for long term benefits.
6. Find Your Position
If possible, put your body in positions that induce peace and reduce stress. Tell yourself during these times that it’s okay to come to the realization that your life was altered. Say to yourself that it happened, but more importantly that you survived and you’ve been given a new opportunity to start over. Grounding yourself is one way of getting rid of stress and calming your body. You can use an ottoman or chair for this exercise. Simply lay on the floor face up and bend your legs at the knees so the lower parts of your legs are resting on top of the ottoman or chair. Now just close your eyes and breathe as you clear your mind. As you do so you should feel your anxiety and stress begin to diminish. You can also lay a heavy blanket over you to aid in assisting you reach peace. You can also do the same exercise by laying flat on the floor with a heavy blanket over you too.
A key takeaway here is that your position to induce peace and reduce stress can look very different from the next person. Find what works for you, and don’t be shy about sharing! You never know what personal win might also help another individual find their way forward.
7. Find Your Daily Diet
What you eat has the potential to affect your body, overall mood, and struggles with stress and depression. This is an area where you can do some research on your own to become more knowledgeable about how certain foods impact you as an individual. Something else to consider here is how all your medications directly affect your stomach and digestion. Diet and digestion are subjects that will surprise you as related to your energy state and how you feel throughout any given day. It’s easy to exhaust yourself on so many different ways to chase inner peace without even knowing how much food and the side-effects of your medicine affect your mood, energy and outlook on any given day.
When it comes to finding the right daily diet for you, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to refueling your body. Try to stay away from fad diets. Do your research and due diligence. And remember to eat what brings you joy, health, and long-term peace!
I hope you find the information in this week’s blog beneficial in finding your way forward after a disabling event. I encourage you to share your thoughts on this subject in the comments below!