Symptoms aren’t permanent, but they ARE a sign that something isn’t right.
A year ago, I was living in a world of continuous and constant symptoms: belly pain, hormonal fluctuations that left me in severe pain, unable to sleep through the night, hungry all the time, with migraine headaches at certain times, recurring diarrhea, frequent anxiety, and severe fatigue. In this state, it wasn’t hard to see and understand that there was something wrong with me that warranted investigation.
I sought out care, and was given some diagnoses, and care suggestions. These included surgery, medications (I refused these, because they weren’t going to address my underlying conditions, but would likely make them worse), psychotherapy, and a few supplements.
What’s interesting to me about this situation is that the symptoms I was experiencing expanded slowly over time. I was aware that things weren’t right, but between my lack of health insurance, lack of trust that doctors would be able help me troubleshoot my whole body system in a holistic way, and profound lack of personal time, since I was a mother of young children, I did what many people do when faced with symptoms: I continued to put up with them, and managed to carry on week to week to week, in spite of them.
If I had paid more attention earlier, I may have spared myself some pretty difficult times, saved myself a hell of a lot of money, and been able to save my uterus.
But if there’s one take home message I’ve learned from my intensive studies this last year, it’s that symptoms are windows into what isn’t working correctly in the body. It’s not normal to have headaches every day at 4 PM, or to regularly be unable to sleep well, or to be constipated every day, or to get regular colds and flus, or to be tired all the time. These symptoms are giving your body vital information that something isn’t right, that something deserves attention and inquiry.
But what do you do to learn what they have to say? First, it’s about beginning to pay attention to the variables we do have control over: our food, our movement routines, our sleep habits, and how we manage stress. Do we always get sleepy after eating a particular food? Do we tend to get constipated when we sit too much all day, or eat something at lunch? If we stay up too late, does it contribute to our migraine headaches? If we watch a movie before bed, does in interfere with our sleep quality? Answering these questions for yourself can give you a lot of power back over your symptoms. If you can evaluate what is causing your problem, you can change the situation, and relieve your difficult symptoms.
If this isn’t enough, it can be helpful to have assistance from a professional who can look for patterns in the symptoms, or evaluate what might be going on in there using lab tests, a health history, or tracking tools. Sometimes, we have to play detective to get to the bottom of things, but with some applied thinking, we can uncover the hidden causes of suffering, and see a path to relief.
Don’t let your un-managed symptoms go, they are messages about imbalance that are best listened to.
