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What if some of the things that you're doing day in and day out are actually making you sick? What if the very things you're doing to try to manage symptoms are the things that are keeping those symptoms alive? Today we're going to talk about the sneaky habits that reinforce chronic pain and chronic symptoms without you even realizing it. And I'll show you how to start flipping them into habits that actually retrain your nervous system towards safety and healing. Welcome to the Building Resilience podcast, episode 248, the Common Habits that are making you sick. Welcome to Building Resilience, a podcast where theory, practical strategies and inspiring stories show you how to unlock your best life. I'm your host, Leah Davidson. As a certified life coach, speech language pathologist, and nervous system resilience expert, it is my mission to teach you how to be more resilient to life's adversities. I will show you how to manage your mind, befriend your nervous system, process, process your emotions, and even eliminate stress. It's time to do more than just survive. It's time to thrive. Let's get started. Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. So, a couple of weeks ago in the nervous system journaling club, I shared a post about what I call dashboard lights. You know how your car lights up when something needs attention? Well, your body does the same thing. Now, a few weeks ago, my dashboard lights work were lighting up. They were lighting up with vertigo. I woke up one morning during a pretty stressful week feeling a bit dizzy. And I know from experience that's often my system's way of whispering, hey, Leah, you're doing too much. You need to slow down. Now, often my gut is the one that speaks to me first. I have had IBS irritable bowel syndrome since my early 20s. It was always the way my system let me know it was dealing with too much. Now, if you're on my email list, you may have seen that I created a super cool resource for you, the IBS Nervous System Reset. It is a comprehensive workbook, worksheets that can help you with IBS or really any other chronic symptom that you may be experiencing. You can get it for only $9 or you can get it for free. If you're a member of the Nervous System journaling club, the links are going to be in the show notes, so check them out. Now, when symptoms rear their ugly head, do I always listen whether it's IBS or vertigo? No. In fact, often I try to ignore it. Now, sometimes distracting Myself helps the symptoms fade when I don't feed them attention. But more often than not, pushing through them just makes it worse. So when I had this bit of dizziness, I pushed through, I finished work, I had dinner, I went shopping with my daughter in law and it ended up being a disaster. I ended up being so dizzy I couldn't try anything on and she had to drive us both home. My body went from whispering with a slight dizziness feeling to yelling. So I had no choice but to listen. When I got home, I took a slow walk because often getting air and getting out helps. I ate some frozen yogurt, I iced my neck and I went to bed early. Now the next morning I cleared my schedule. I took my time getting up and I asked myself throughout the day what is my nervous system asking for right now? Because that is the thing about dashboard lights. They are not random. For me it might be vertigo, but for somebody else it's migraines or these IBS flares or hip pain or back pain or tinnitus or anxiety. They can all be considered signals and not enemies. Now the problem is most of us don't recognize them as signals. We respond with habits that actually make them worse. And that's what I want to talk about today. So chronic pain and chronic symptoms. We usually define these as pain and symptoms that are lasting longer than two to three months. They all fall under something called neuroplastic pain. That means the nervous system has learned to stay stuck in protection mode. So whether they started from an injury or not, we know that the body heals. But sometimes the pain and the symptoms signals can become learned. Now don't misunderstand me, the pain is real. Trust me, the dizziness is real, the IBS is real. But the source, the root isn't permanent damage. It's your brain and body interpreting signals as danger. It's your brain that may have learned the symptoms and the pain signals. Now here is how I often think of it and have shared it before. Your nervous system is like this smoke alarm. Sometimes it's going off because there is really a fire. But other times it is just burnt toast. So chronic symptoms are often burnt toast. Alarms, they're signals of danger, but they are false alarms. And what wires this loop even tighter is habits. Everyday things we do or don't do, things we may think are neutral or even help helpful. But these things can actually reinforce the pain or symptoms that we're experiencing. So I want to walk you through some of the biggest ones. And if you do any of these Habits. I don't want you to beat yourself up about it. These are very, very common habits. I just want you to start building some awareness to understand that some of these habits may be keeping you stuck in a loop that, that you don't want to be in. Awareness is really powerful, but it's not meant to be used against yourself. So habit one is talking about the symptoms nonstop. Now, let's start with how we talk. When every single conversation revolves around your pain or fatigue, your brain is listening, and naturally it's going to then conclude, oh, she's talking about it all the time. So this must be very, very important. Let's keep sending the signal. It's kind of like giving pain a microphone and a spel spotlight every time you open your mouth. So imagine it being like a performer on stage. It's stepping on stage, the spotlight is on it, it has a microphone. And if the audience keeps clapping and chanting their name, asking for an encore, the performer is going to stay on stage longer. Talking about symptoms too much is like giving your pain this standing ovation, giving them the spotlight, the microphone, and then the standing ovation and giving the audience this big encore. So. So we really want to be mindful of how much of the spotlight we are giving the pain and giving the symptoms. Now, maybe you're not a talker. Maybe you're more of a researcher. Which leads me to the next habit. A compulsive Googling and reassurance seeking. Or maybe constantly checking in now with ChatGPT. So maybe you feel a new twinge and suddenly you're on Google or ChatGPT at 2am Searching rare diseases. Or you are constantly, constantly asking your friends and doctors the same questions on repeat, over and over and over. And of course, that hit of reassurance, it actually does feel really good in the moment. It's kind of like scratching an itch. But you know how scratching a mosquito bite makes it itch even more later? At least it does for me. It may feel good in the moment, but it gets worse later on. Well, it's the same thing here. The more you seek reassurance, the more you scratch that itch, this anxiety can come back even stronger. So what you're doing is you're teaching your brain this sensation equals danger. So you better keep checking. And when we're checking and Googling constantly, the natural next step is to start avoiding. Which brings me to habit number three. We start avoiding activities just in case. This is the habit of kind of like shrinking your life. You're going to end up skipping the exercise and canceling social plans and avoiding travel. This was a big one for me. When my IBS was at its worst, I would cancel plans and trips and I would avoid going out. So you can think of it like you're putting up roadblocks on a map. Now, at first it feels protective, like you're avoiding potholes, and we think it is the right thing to do. But over time, your world gets smaller and smaller and your nervous system never learns that roads are actually safe. So every time you avoid, you reinforce the belief that the world is unsafe and my body is fragile. There's a saying that what you resist persists. And when you avoid things, you are sending a very clear message that whatever it is you're avoiding is dangerous. I was listening to a podcast episode the other day. I think it was Mel Robbins. I'm not sure who she was talking to, but she was talking about how understands now that she played a big role in perpetuating the anxiety her kids had because she thought she was being loving by allowing them to avoid the very things that they were anxious about. But what that actually does is it taught the kids that what they are avoiding is dangerous. And then they never have any opportunities to learn otherwise. And even if you're not avoiding outright, you still might be hyper monitoring. And that is the next habit. Now, again, I want you to be really kind to yourself. If you know you do any of these habits, it's normal and very human to do so. But maybe you find yourself in a constant symptom checking mode. Maybe you're scanning your body all day long. Maybe you wake up and you're checking, do I have a tight shoulder? Is a headache coming on? Or a gut cramping or clenching? And you can think of this like you're constantly refreshing your email inbox. You never give yourself a break because you're always checking. Is something bad happening? And whatever we check the most, the brain tags it as high priority. So if you refresh your inbox 100 times a day, your brain will conclude emails must be a life or death situation. They must be very important. So the same thing with symptoms, constant checking wires in hypervigilance. And while some of us live in our bodies scanning every single sensation, others live in their heads, rehearsing scary stories over and over and over again. Which brings us to habit number five. This is the habit of future tripping. What if it never goes away? What if I can't work? What if this ruins my trip? Now we spend time rehearsing all of our fear stories and catastrophizing. It's like we are investing time in rehearsing for a play that we don't actually want to perform. But every time you run the lines, you're memorizing them more deeply. Your nervous system is the actor and essentially your script that you keep feeding it is fear. The more you rehearse, the more convincing your performance is going to become. You are practicing and getting good at being fearful. And I bet if this is one of your habits, fear rehearsing, that those fear rehearsals often start first thing in the morning, maybe even before you get up. So habits 6 revolves around checking for pain first thing in the morning. Now, maybe you relate to opening up your eyes as soon as you wake up and before you do anything else, your brain scans is it there is a symptom there, Is it worse? So think of it like the first thing you do is wake up, turn on the news and only watch the disaster headlines. What happens is you see start the day in this crisis mode before you even had breakfast. Your system gets all jacked up all the time, right away. And this is why it's not recommended to reach for your phone first thing in the morning and check the news or check anything else that can get you all jacked up. And again, many of us are guilty of this. This is why one important step is to give equal air time or eat time as I call it. For every bad thing you read about or think about, you need to bal it with good. So if you read a headline about a disaster, then you need to find a story that's inspiring to you. If not tuning into pain, first thing makes pain the main character of your story before the day even starts. Now, some people don't just check, they even will write it down. Which brings me to journaling. Now you know I am a huge advocate of journaling. I even have the nervous system journaling club, which I invite you to come join me in. Because journaling can be very healing and very regulating for the nervous system. It can help you manage stress, but only if it's used in a way that serves you, such as processing emotions and tracking safety or noticing joy or expressing gratitude. If your habit is recording pain intensity every single day, rating where the pain is moving what body parts, then you're turning pain into headline news of your life. So imagine a newspaper that always leads with disaster strikes again. Now that's your story that your brain is memorizing. And I know this is a tricky one because when you do go see Many doctors, they do want the data. The data is information, and you may feel that you have to track it. We're often even given tracking sheets to track our symptoms. So there is a careful balance. We want to collect data, but again, it's about equal air time. Are you tracking your symptoms and tracking safety? Are you also journaling the good or the calm that you experience or the safety that you felt? Are you deliberately trying to track the good? Notice pleasant sensations or even neutral ones, because what you focus on grows what you water grows. And with journaling, your nervous system is reading it as you're writing it. And the story, story you write is a story that your brain is going to learn. And then what goes hand in hand with writing about pain? Well, bracing for it in your body. Habit number eight is tensing and bracing on autopilot. I want you to tune into your body a little bit right now. So just check your shoulders, check your jaw, check your stomach right now. What are they doing? Are they relaxed? Because most of us have the unconscious habit of clenching and bracing for impact. Like we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's like driving with your foot on the brake and the gas at the same time, which is exhausting. And you might not even notice that you're doing it until you start paying attention to what is actually happening in your body. That is why interoception is so important. Interoception is your ability to get inside your body and pay attention to the sensations that you feel. What is going on in your body. When you pay attention, you'll often see that your body rehearses danger hundreds of times a day, but rarely rehearses what safety feels like. That is why I think it is so important to stop and use tools like the safety sequence so you can get good at practicing what safety feels like. So your body can start having a model for what safety feels like. Now, the next habit may be one of the sneakiest ones at all because it feels so reasonable. Delaying joy until you feel better. So do you ever say things like, oh, I'll go back to painting one day once these migraines stop, or I'll start dating again once my anxiety calms down. I'll travel once the IBS is under control or gone. Now that was the one. That was something I had really rehearsed. Well, so it's this habit. It's like telling yourself you'll only water the garden after it rains. Well, the flowers will never get what they need on a consistent basis. So joy and Fun and pleasure is the water that your nervous system actually needs. Now, postponing joy only keeps soil dry and keeps the loop going. So we want to be introducing drops of joy on a daily basis, trying to build up what we can call our joy bucket. And finally, the habit that seeps into your identity itself. Literally making pain your identity. This one is also very, very sneaky. And it can happen when pain takes over so much of your story that you start introducing yourself through it. It's like wearing a name tag that says, hello, I'm back pain. Or I'm migraines, I'm ibs, I'm neck pain. Now, when pain becomes the way you relate to others, your brain fuses the symptom with your sense of self. And identities are sticky like that. They are the hardest habits to break. Now again, I don't want you to go and to get all judgy with yourself and shame yourself if you experience any of these habits. We just want to be building up the awareness that these habits are like daily training sessions for your nervous system. Each time you repeat them, you are rehearsing the pain and symptoms. But just like you can practice pain and hyper vigilance and fear, you can also start rehearsing safety. Just like practicing piano or practicing soccer, you can practice new nervous system habits. And with repetition, your system learns and can learn a new default. That is what neuroplasticity is all about. So I want to introduce you to a few microhabits that can be used to help you reframe. And these are micro, so they're a bit easier to just try out. Now the first one is simply try to talk less about pain and talk more about safety. You want to try to spotlight the calm and not just the chaos. So this is exactly where the equal air time or the eat time comes in. So I'm not saying ignoring all the hard or just trying to be positive, but try to have some balance. Do a little bit of both. If you are on the symptom disaster channel, then make sure to also change it to the inspirational gratitude or at least the neutral channel. Now secondly, this is along the same lines. You want to check the less for pain and check more for neutral or good sensations. Or at least try to balance them out. Train your brain to notice balance and not just alarms. And then thirdly, see if you can notice and catch the fear story and then swap it out for a what now Story. Remind yourself that you do have agency in how you respond to things. So even though you may have a symptom even though you may have some pain. Okay, what now? What do you get to choose to try to do with this symptom and this pain? Maybe you can release your bracing. Maybe you drop your shoulders down, you let your jaw get soft. Maybe you can just breathe. Let your body just practice safety. Practice the Safety Sequence and as often as you can throughout the day Am I safe? Do I feel safe? Relax the body if you don't know what I'm talking about. With the Safety Sequence, there's a whole video that goes and reviews exactly what the Safety Sequence is. There's also a section in my journal, Resilience that's available on Amazon that covers all the steps of the Safety Sequence. There's a little card in there that you can also use to carry it around to remind you to be doing the Safety Sequence throughout the day. So try different ways to relax the body too. And lastly, don't delay joy. Invite it in, even in small doses, because every ounce of joy or gratitude you have is helping rewire your brain. Chronic pain or chronic symptoms are certainly not your fault, and they are not a sign of weakness either. Your brain has brilliantly learned to adapt, but pain and symptoms can be reinforced by our habits, and our habits are changeable. So this week, if you can pick just one of these habits that maybe you recognize in yourself, notice it and then flip it and practice the new version in micro doses. That's how rewiring starts. Not with giant leaps, but with these dashboard lights that help you build awareness and then micro practices of safety. And then make sure to check out my new guide, the IBS Nervous System Reset. Even if IBS is not one of your dash lights, this guide will help you see how your nervous system plays a role in chronic pain and illness. I'll put a link in the show notes or it's available for free. When you are a member of the Nervous System Journaling Club, so I'll drop a link for that too. I hope you found this episode helpful and I will see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Building Resilience podcast. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about managing stress, building resilience, and leading a more purposeful life life, then make sure we're connected on Instagram and Facebook @leah davidsonlife coaching. You can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter at www.leahdavidsonlifecoaching.com newsletter. Looking forward to connecting.