Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #49. Why Most Women Who Take Time Off to Heal Chronic Illness Won’t Actually Get Better

Transcript

#49. Why Most Women Who Take Time Off to Heal Chronic Illness Won’t Actually Get Better · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You left your job to heal or you took leave, stepped back and cleared the time and space.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's been a few months now and your health feels exactly the same.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some days your wiped out for no reason you can point to.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some days a full flare takes you out completely.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You did the one thing everyone said you needed to do to heal your chronic illness and your body hasn't responded at all.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about why.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, endometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week, we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to compliment not replace your medical care.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll learn how taking time off to heal can make your chronic illness worse instead of better.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll uncover the hidden pressure you've been putting on your body since the day you stopped work or the day you took leave.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you'll find out why rest hasn't been working and what has to shift before your body can actually repair.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You think you stopped working?
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: you didn't.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you actually did was swap one job for another.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The day you left or took the leave, or finally stepped back, healing became the thing you do all day.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became your new occupation.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And without ever deciding to, you brought the whole structure of a job along with you, because approaching something that matters like a job is the only way you've ever really known how to do anything.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about what a job actually entails.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes with KPIs and targets.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now you've got healing milestones.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: This sense that you should be so much further along than you are now.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes with a timeline, so healing has been given a deadline.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and every week that passes without meaningful progress feels like you're running out of time.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes with performance reviews, so every day has turned into an assessment of how your body did.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You wake up and somewhere in the back of your mind, you're already asking whether today counts as progress or whether you've lost another day.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a job comes with a pause and a fail, which means there is now a version of this where you're doing healing well and a version where you're failing at it.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here's what makes this different from any job you've ever had.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The boss is you, and the workplace is your own body, which is the one place you can never leave.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't click out of it, you can't go home from it.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't close the laptop and get a break from it.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a normal job, at some point you walk out the freaking door.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: With this one, there's no escape.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You show up 24 hours a day and you never get a break.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the pattern.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what does this actually look like day-to-day?
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I worked with a young woman in her 20s who had chronic fatigue syndrome.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was so exhausted, she couldn't keep working, so she took leave.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was supposed to be her time to finally recover, and when we looked at what her days were actually made up of, here's what we found.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: She'd get up and immediately there was a list, make the bed do the laundry meal prep, then the healing things, the practice as she was supposed to be doing, and she moved through all of it the exact same way she'd moved through everything she did at work.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: One thing straight into the next, this constant sense that she had to keep getting through it.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: She wasn't resting at any point, not really.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even the parts of the day that were meant to be recovery had become tasks to complete.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And underneath all of it was this urgency, this pressure to get the next thing done, and then the next one, like she was behind on a job nobody had actually given her.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I pointed it out to her, it genuinely stopped her in her tracks.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was this realization of, oh my God, I'm not actually resting.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I took time off to rest and I haven't rested once.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: She'd been laying down, she'd been going to bed early, she'd been doing what looked like all the right things, but she was never once in an actual state of rest.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: She just rebuilt her whole job inside her recovery and never noticed she'd done it.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I saw a version of this with another woman I worked with too, and hers looks completely different on the surface.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: She had taken three months off work.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was the window that she and her husband had agreed on.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three months to finally get on top of the debilitating migraines that were completely wiping her out.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I asked her how she was spending her days, here's what they were full of.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: getting the kids to school, taking them to their appointments, getting herself to the doctor, running the entire household.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of that is simply necessary.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course it is, nobody is arguing that.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when she really looked at her day, start to finish, there was not one single point in it where she was actually resting.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not one.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the days would fill up, the pressure would build with nowhere to go, and eventually it would boil over into this wave
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the clock on her three months was ticking the whole time.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two completely different women, one with chronic fatigue, one with chronic migraines, one with an empty house, one with a full one, and the exact same pattern was running underneath.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'd both take in this time off and neither of them was resting for a single second of it.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about why this actually keeps your body stuck.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know by now that your body can't repair while it's in survival mode.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has to feel safe before it will drop into the rest and digest state where their real healing happens.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: That part is a new if you've been listening for a while.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's new is this deadline?
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't set a date and decide your body is going to be better by then, but that's exactly what you've done.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now your body is getting one message all day every day that you're failing.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not there yet.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You should be further along than this.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That message is the exact opposite of what your body needs to repair.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It cannot feel safe while it's failing.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Failing feels like a threat.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you should be doing more and achieving more and getting further.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the safety your body has been waiting for never arrives.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the part I need you to really hear.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pressure and force are two things the body does not respond to.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You cannot force your weight into healing, and you cannot pressure your weight into it either.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you try to force your weight to that outcome, your body will force you to take the rest that you need and you won't take yourself.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The woman I just told you about the one with the three months in the migraines.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think her body did?
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It consistently put her in a state where she had no choice but to take the rest.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wiped her out completely, flat on her back in a dark room.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is not a coincidence.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her body forced the rest on her because she wasn't giving it to herself any other way.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the why this is why we care about this.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here's the shift.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of waiting for your body to force the rest on you, you decide to take it on purpose on your terms.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is you choosing intentional rest, and need to be really clear about what that actually is, because it is almost certainly not what you've been calling rest.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Real rest looks like this.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Option one is genuinely doing nothing.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eyes open or eyes closed even just five or ten minutes at a time.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we honest with you.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is going to feel unbearable at first.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You want to reach for your phone, get up, do something, anything.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That discomfort is the whole point.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the sign of how badly you need this and how long it's been since you actually let yourself stop.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Option two, lie on your back and rest your legs straight up against the wall so your body makes an L shape and you stay there for a few minutes.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the most well-known restorative poses for helping the body settle and come down out of that heightened activated state.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sounds almost too simple, but get into it and you'll fill your body start to calm down.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, you can do this a few times a day to help you shift back into a parasympathetic state, our rest and digest mode.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The third option is easily something you can do multiple times a day.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Put one hand on your chest and one on your belly and just rest them there and lean into the weight and the warmth of your own hands for a few minutes.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This practice is also really well known in the wellness world because touch is one of the very first ways your body ever learned it was safe.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about when you're a baby.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second you're picked up and held against someone else, you settle.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That wiring never leaves you.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Being held and feeling warm contact in a bit of gentle weight is a language your body has understood since before you had words.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when you rest your hands on yourself like this, you're speaking to it in exactly that language, telling it that it's safe and it can settle.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything we talked about today comes back to one thing.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pressure keeping your body in survival mode, a state where it can't heal is real, but what's driving it is specific to you.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the woman in this episode, it's the timeline.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sense that healing is a job she's failing at.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: For you, it might be something else entirely, and until you know exactly what it is, you can't take the pressure off because you can't see what's generating it.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what my free chat GPT prompt is for.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It takes your physical symptoms and shows you the emotional patterns that may be underneath them in 30 seconds.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Go and download it while you can the link is in the show notes.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You learn that the time you've taken off isn't really being used for rest, because you turned healing into a job your terrified of failing at.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You learned that the pressure to get better is the exact thing keeping you from getting better.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you learn that rest is either a choice you make for yourself, on your terms, or it's when your body ends up making for you.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this episode was helpful for you, please take three seconds to rate this podcast.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It boosts the visibility of the show and makes it so much easier for other women like you to find it.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much in advance, and I'll see you in the next episode.