When Pain Changes My Behavior
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My health, and by that, I mean my general body condition, is important to me. I want to feel fit and feel good about myself, the same as everybody does. And I’ve always done some exercise in various forms since I was a teenager.
But I did also used to smoke, until my son was born, and then I quit. But strangely, even when I smoked, I thought I was pretty healthy. I guess it’s human nature to justify doing the things we want to do, even when it is doing us harm.
Like everybody, I have some things that I would call health issues, but in the last ten years, they have definitely multiplied. I probably get headaches every week and sometimes on the same day each week. These are the kind of headaches that medicine won’t cure, and I just have to live with the pain until I’m released from it.
Going to the restroom is another example. I definitely go to the restroom more than anyone I know. And I’d say at best what I can get from it is... feeling uncomfortable because I need to go, being embarrassed because I need to go again, and worrying about whether I’ll have the opportunity to go again in the future.
These things are a constant problem and affect my whole day because I have to navigate through some tricky situations while also trying to cope with these health issues. Another thing that has multiplied in the last ten years is the amount of pain I have. And by that, I mean actual physical pain.
I’m not talking about anything major like fractures or breaks, but bruises, cuts, and scrapes have become part of my weekly routine. It’s honestly ridiculous. I feel like there’s a weekly quota of pain that I’m unintentionally trying to achieve every week.
And it’s probably the only area of my life where I really can’t see any rhyme or reason to it. Instead of "no pain, no gain," it seems to be more like "no pain....no pain!" But however pointless it seems, I still can’t avoid it, even though I’m very careful.
There are other times, though, when the pain does feel more meaningful. And it makes me think I should stop doing what I’m doing or that I shouldn’t have done the thing that I just did.
There are times when the pain is like a wake-up call to change my behavior. I’ll give you an example. I was at home in the shower recently, and I was stressing about a problem at work, and then I dropped the showerhead on my foot. It was painful, nothing serious, but it really made me snap out of my unhealthy thoughts and think that maybe I should stop stressing and think about something else instead.
And that brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about: stress. This period of my life has without a doubt been the busiest and most stressful. And I’ve been under a lot of pressure in every area.
But after years of this, I do feel that it has had a positive effect, in that it has made me better at prioritizing what’s important and better at decision-making. The stress always comes in waves, and each time it comes, it pushes me to the limit or even beyond the limit of what I can endure, and then it fades away.
All of my health issues are like this. There’s an element of them taking me just past what I can bear, and then finally being released from it. But the two most important things that I notice about these issues are the repetition of them and the timing of them.
