Day 3 Afraid of exercise, but doing it anyway

[homorobothead]

Hello all and thank you for reading,

I have lifted weights for 12 years and did cycling for about 8 years on and off. My job is very physical (I am a potter, so there's a lot of lifting and moving heavy clay around, as well as working repetitively on the wheel.)

I stopped lifting for about 6 months after developing elbow tendonitis (when my brother died, no coincidence there) which rapidly morphed into severe neck pain and stiffness. I went to a PT and an online counselor and got somewhat better and went back to lifting weights and cycling, but then started feeling the pain really strongly in my elbows again about a week ago, so I stopped again, because I am afraid of endangering my pottery practice.

I'm getting back on my bike tonight, but I am terrified of straining my neck or causing a migraine, because I have a full day of work in the studio tomorrow.

I've read several of your stories and know that some of y'all have much more physically involved scans and are skateboarding, running, dancing, etc. and I am impatient to feel less afraid doing what I love too.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
R

 

[JanAtheCPA]

Hi there @homorobothead and welcome to the program and the forum!

It may be a little late for "tonight" wherever you are, but there are a number of different techniques we all use or that are frequently recommended here, I'll start this out with my favorites:

1. Read Hope & Help For Your Nerves, by Claire Weekes. It's the little book that has saved countless thousands of people around the world from crippling anxiety for over five decades. Written in 1969 (long before Dr. Sarno started publishing his theories) her language seems a little bit quaint, but her wisdom and compassion are timeless, and her advice is easy to understand.

2. Be willing to talk back to your fearful primitive brain - this is the TMS brain mechanism which is choosing to send pain signals where they are simply not needed. It's important to remember at all times that ALL pain, in fact every physical sensation we can possible have, comes from message centers in the brain. Sensations do not physically occur at the site of the symptom! This is a neurological fact. If there is an actual illness or injury in the body, the immune system (using incredibly complex processes) basically connects with the nervous system to send an alert to the brain, which creates the pain sensation in order to get us to STOP and pay attention. The thing about TMS that you must never forget is that the exact same brain mechanism is perfectly capable of creating every known sensation just for the purposes of distracting us from what it considers to be life-threatening dangerous behavior - which in the modern world means behavior in which we expose ourselves to whatever the stressor of the day happens to be (job, relationships, traffic, finances, technology, total world disorder... the list is endless). In other words, our modern stressors and anxieties are NOT life-threatening, but our primitive brains don't know that. They only understand the stress response, and respond accordingly. (And uniquely, don't forget that either).

Anyway, the key to #2 is to talk back with constructive and truthful statements. My personal favorite is "Hey, brain - this (symptom or whatever) is NOT NECESSARY!" The idea is to make your brain understand that whatever it's trying to repress, it's okay to get it out in the open and face it, because the worst that can possibly happen is that the thing will make you feel emotionally uncomfortable and vulnerable and perhaps even more fearful for a while - but it can't physically hurt you.

3. Baby steps, Baby! Ease back in to the physical activity that scares you. Take your time and spend plenty of time on the logical self-talk. Visualize the wonderful things that the physical and aerobic exercise are doing for your perfectly healthy body, and when you go to bed, try a short meditative visualization with deep therapeutic breathing, in which you sleep peacefully throughout the night after you exercise, and wake up feeling great!

 

[homorobothead]

Hi JanAtheCPA,

Thank you so much for your advice and support. It's still very helpful this morning after I rode my bike last night and awoke to no migraine or neck strain after telling myself as I rode "this is just a sensation. It isn't causing any damage."

I will definitely pick up "Hope and Help for Your Nerves." I'm currently reading Alan Gordon's book, but it seems like it would be a perfect supplement.

It's so worth remembering that whatever my brain is trying to repress can't hurt me, that it might just make me feel a little emotionally vulnerable (which I have trouble with because expressing vulnerability in my house was not a safe thing to do), but now I'm safe physically and so an expression of vulnerability won't catch me a beating anymore. I just have to convince my brain of that.

I really, really like the idea of visualizing all of the positive things exercise is doing for my perfectly healthy body and doing a short meditation where I visualize sleeping peacefully through the night.

Thank you again so much for taking the time to help and support me. I appreciate it so much!