Latest / The Everyday Awesome Project / 89: When Your Body Says Slow Down: Finding Patience Through Illness and Injury

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89: When Your Body Says Slow Down: Finding Patience Through Illness and Injury · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Hello, hello, hello, beautiful humans.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Just Coach Sam here today doing a solo episode.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Welcome.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Today I want to talk about something I'm in the middle of and I think many of you might be able to relate the situation.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we find ourselves in humaning you know this life humans from being either injured or ill in the middle of this busy life, especially for people who are okay I'm talking about myself now goal-oriented doers.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm a bit of a type A.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: I like things to go a certain way.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I have a plan, I have goals, I have aspirations, I have structure, I have discipline.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I like things to go a certain way.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Can you relate?
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: I have this crazy idea that I have any control over any of it.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: But all right, so anyway, let's get into it.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: So my current situation is I have two things going on.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I have something I've talked about on prior pods a small intestinal bacteria and fungi infection.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: So I have SIBO and SIFO.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: So a small intestine bacterial and fungi infection.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: We speculate.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: I got this infection training for Ironman last year, swimming in a myriad of places open water in particular, where there is lots of available fungus and bacteria to get into the human body.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: So it took me months to get it diagnosed and I'm well on the way now to a healing protocol.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: But it has been taking a long time and I am practicing functional medicine which is a hybrid of Western and holistic not even alternative just you know, holistic and natural approaches to healing your body, root cause medicine and so this takes time and this takes patience on top of the long process of even getting diagnosed.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: So I haven't been feeling great or like myself in quite a long time now, months and months and months.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: So now we're in the summer and this all manifest in the winter time.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: So all the way through spring and into summer all manifest in the winter time.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: So all the way through spring and into summer not feeling great.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: And then, additionally, I recently injured myself on top of this by three weeks of travel back to back, to back trips for work and pleasure and a lot of driving, a lot of traveling, being out of my normal routine and really overdoing it in some instances, not really with an athletic approach of overdoing, believe it or not, but other things.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: And so here I am I've got this gut issue, am I've got this gut issue that is slowly healing, and I have a low back and hip injury that is slowly healing.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: So, yes, I'm on the path to healing and, thank goodness, I'm knowledgeable about the human body and how it works and how to heal these things.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: But boy is it freaking frustrating, because, again, somebody like me, who likes things to go a certain way, can you relate?
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Who has goals, who has a way of operating the world?
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I know what makes me feel good, right, my exercise routine, my nutrition, my sleep, my structure, my habits, my rituals are all things that I have honed over many, many, many years and I'm constantly learning and constantly evolving in this way.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: But here I am not feeling like myself.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: So if you've ever been in this predicament where you've been injured or ill and just literally didn't feel like yourself and, by the way, this illness could be physical, it could be mental, emotional I've had those too, unfortunately, because we're humans, so we all get these and that's how I know you can all relate.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: But what I want to talk about today is what happens and how to deal with it.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: What happens and how to deal with it?
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: So if you're injured or you become ill, it is a sign that your body, brain and life are out of balance, out of homeostasis.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Some people would say that disease is actually a cause of dis-ease.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: So if you're out of balance in some way, shape or form related to your body, your brain or your life, you will get injured.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: You will get an illness.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: So the number one thing for us all to do is to listen to our bodies.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: When's the last time you actually listened to your body I mean, really listened?
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: I've been working on this skill for over 25 years.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: I learned the hard way on this one, and so I've gotten really damn good at listening to my body, listening to my brain and really listening to my heart and my soul and my spirit.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, so when you listen to your body, there are messages coming your way.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Now you can choose to listen to these messages or you can choose to ignore them.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Why would we ignore ourselves?
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: We are, and should be, our own best friend.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: We know more about our body, our brain, our life, our heart than anyone.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: We should be listening.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: So having an awareness is the first step and listening is the first step.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Something doesn't feel right.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: What is it?
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: And if you can address things early on, before they become really problematic or debilitating, that is the ideal situation.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: How you can do that is by listening and then making adjustments to whatever that might be, that area of your body, your brain, your life that needs attention.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: So obviously a big one is managing the stress, the life and the workload we put on ourselves.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: We put that life and workload on ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, financially.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: There's so many different ways that we apply stress upon ourselves daily and unfortunately, in this modern world, many of us live in stressful environments as well, externally stressful environments, ones that we don't even create, that we have nothing to do with.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: So this compounding amount of stress can easily lead to imbalance of stress can easily lead to imbalance.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: So if you do not have awareness and you're not taking a regular inventory of these stressors in your life the load per se that's coming from your work, the load that's coming from your relationships, the load that's coming from your finances, the physical load you're putting on yourself doing physical activities If you don't have awareness and take a regular inventory of these things, they can very quickly compound and overwhelm the systems of the body.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: It will lead to breakdown your health.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health should be your number one focus.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: That's true for all of us, irrelevant of who we are, how old we are, what the circumstances are within our life.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: If we do not have health, we have nothing.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: It is truly, truly your greatest asset and therefore it should be your biggest investment.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: You're going to get the biggest return on investment focusing on your health.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: So sometimes we need to step back.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: We need to take inventory of all of these different stressors that are going on in our life physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially, relationship-wise and reassess our priorities.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Are we doing the right thing by us?
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: If we value health the most and we understand it should be our highest priority and that we should be investing in time, energy, money, resources, attention in building health, then you'll find quite frequently, as we all do, that sometimes other things have gotten in the way.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: It is up to us to course correct, take stuff off of our plate that is not serving us, it's not generating and creating health in our life, and add things back in that we have let go, that we know make us feel healthy, strong, vibrant, productive, happy.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So all of it really starts with awareness.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: All of it must start with listening to your body, looking for signs of imbalance and then course correcting them as you move through the journey.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Now, if you do find yourself injured or ill, like I did, like I have a couple times recently Don't ignore, don't override, don't push through excessive signs of soreness or aches or pains or things that just don't feel right in your physical body.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: And do not ignore things that are continuing to give you signals, like a persistent cough, a lack of energy, brain fog, headaches, gut issues.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Don't ignore and don't override.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Take the opportunity to respect yourself and your body and all the signals it's sending your way, yourself and your body and all the signals it's sending your way.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: These signals are happening for a reason.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: The human body is freaking miraculous.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: It can, in many instances, heal itself if we give it the support it needs.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: If we listen, if we ignore, we override, we continue to push on, we will become ill or injured.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: So, risk versus rewards, okay.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's not about pushing, it's not about pulling.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's about pausing.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Know when to push, know when to pull, know when to pause.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: I'm learning this lesson the hard way right now, again, for the umpteenth time in my life.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: We must have the patience.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: We must have the patience to heal.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: We must have the patience to heal, and patience to heal requires self-compassion, self-awareness, self-love.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: The patience to heal requires self-compassion, self-awareness and self-love.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: If you come across somebody or you are the person in question who doesn't seem to have the patience to heal, then you need to question am I not self-aware enough?
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Am I lacking self-compassion?
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: And ultimately, do I not love myself enough to pause Now.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Once you overcome said injury or illness and I'm in the process of overcoming now, so I'm moving through this emotionally with you as well what you will gain from that is a lot of resilience, a lot of adaptation.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Healing the physical body is a form of adaptation.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: You will overcome setbacks from illness and injury and that will come with a flood of emotions all completely normal by the way.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: First you might be pissed off like I was completely normal by the way.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: First you might be pissed off like I was no-transcript.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Then you might be grateful for the lessons along this journey.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: You will become more flexible and you will adapt and become more resilient, like I said, and ultimately you will become proud that you made it through the other side and you're a better person because of it, in that you also will recognize with humility that you are a human being and you have compassion for yourself and for others.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: The next time you meet somebody injured or with a disability or ill, you will have a flood of compassion that maybe you didn't have before.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Your awareness will have a flood of compassion that maybe you didn't have before.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Your awareness will have shifted.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: You will have humility of what it's like to be living the human experience in this human body.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Additionally, you might battle something called an identity crisis.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: I'm laughing out loud because I've definitely done this umpteen times.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: I am an athlete.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: I do endurance sports, ultra endurance sports, adventure, crossfit, you name it.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I do a lot of fun things and I'm really, really thrilled to have that as part of my lifestyle.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: That I didn't have for the first 30 years but I've been graceful and gratitude and graced with doing the last 26 years.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: It's a big part of my identity.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: It's how I experience the world.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Actually, it's how I see, smell, touch, feel, breathe and move through the world.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: It makes me happy.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It brings me so much joy.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: So it's a big part of my identity to do all of those activities that does require that my physical body and my mental and emotional body are healthy, to do those things, that I am motivated and disciplined and I have the energy and I have motivated and disciplined and I have the energy and I have the strength and I have the endurance and I have the flexibility and I have the wherewithal and all of the things required for me to do this variety of things I love to do with my life, and so when I can't do those things no matter how long or short the period of time is or I can do them at a much lower level there's a bit of an identity crisis that comes with that.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Can you relate?
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: How many people do you know who have in the past, when they were younger maybe, played a sport or they were competitive or they did some kind of physical activity?
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: That was a big part of their identity.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: And then they aged and they either gained weight, got out of shape, hurt themselves, had a surgery, whatever, and they're no longer doing those things.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It's a part of their identity that is lost and with that comes grief.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: It's really important that we look at this and we're honest about this.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Right now I am missing tremendously my running because I'm only able to hike with this hip and back injury at a much slower pace than I'm accustomed to and for a much shorter period of time.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: I'm not feeling great in my gut function trying to heal this bacterial infection.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: So it's affected my nutrition and my sleep and just how my body feels.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: It's really challenging parts of my identity and it's really allowing me to pause and question.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: What do I value?
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: What do I stand for?
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Who am I in the world?
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: How important are these things?
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying I'm giving any of it up anytime soon.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Hell, no, I'm way too stubborn for that.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: I'm way too stubborn for that.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: But it's a part of who I am.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: It's not all of who I am.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: There's so much more to me as a human being than those things, than those sports or skills or accomplishments.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: It's a piece of my story.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: It's not my whole story and I will continue every damn day to write my story.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: I'm the author of my story.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: So letting your identity evolve through an illness, through an injury.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: And then, lastly, I want to talk about this false sense of control that we all might have out there.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, the reality is we don't have control over what happens.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Everything is impermanent.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: The one thing we know to be true is that everything is changing constantly.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Everything is impermanent.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: So it makes me feel good to know that this circumstance I'm in with this injury and this gut illness are impermanent.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: They will pass.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: I am grateful for that.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: My cells will regenerate my gut walls and microbiome will regenerate my soft tissue in my hip, around my muscles, and my connective tissue will all regenerate.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: I'm so grateful to know that change is the constant and everything is impermanent.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: But also there's that lack of control, that lack of not being able to be in charge of the process or to stop these things from even happening in the first place.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: It's simply not a reality.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Yes, we can be aware, we can prioritize and really keep check on overdoing, overriding, becoming out of balance, listening to our body, being aware, allowing enough recovery physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, managing our stress.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Of course, we can do all of these things, but at the end of the day, lots of things will happen that are not in our control, and that's okay.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: They will pass.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: We will evolve through them.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Our identity will grow beyond them.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: It will continue to evolve, just like everything else in the world, and for that I'm incredibly grateful.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: So I'm sending you love and healing, no matter if you're injured or ill or not.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Healthy healthy if you're injured or ill or not.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Healthy, healthy, healthy when you're injured or ill, remember those times that you were not.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: It wasn't that long ago.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: I'm speaking to myself now and so now, when I once return to full fitness, full health, I will be even more grateful and even more alive in every single one of those moments, because I know nothing is permanent.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: All right, beautiful humans, I love you, love you.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Love you.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Go on about your day, and thanks for listening today.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate you.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Remember this how your life feels and how your body feels, how your brain feels, how your heart and soul feel, are the most important.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Have a great day Today, and every day is a great day to feel and become awesome.