Episode 6: What It Really Means to Listen to Your Body
Description: Learning to listen to your body isn't always easy, especially when it means slowing down or giving up things you love. In this episode, Tina shares her journey managing chronic sciatic pain and how paying close attention to her body has helped her find slow, steady progress. It's an invitation to tune back into your own body and figure out what it actually needs.
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Resources: Tell Me Where It Hurts by Rachel Zoffness
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Everyday Wellness with Dr. Tina H. Boogren. I am your host, Tina Boogren, and I'm so happy you are here. It's been a little while since I've started up the podcast and asked us to just pause and slow down and calm our nervous system and take a nice deep breath. So let's go ahead and do that now. Just wherever you are, just kind of slow yourself down, pause, get your feet on the ground if you can, and shut out the world around you to the best of your abilities. And allow yourself to get fully present back in your body and in this space and just take a nice deep breath Good. I hope that felt good. As we move into week six, I can't believe it, we are six weeks into this season, the invitation that I want you to think about is an invitation to what we just did, get back into your body.
So let me tell you kind of the inspiration and impetus behind this one. I think I mentioned last week that I have been dealing with a lot of sciatica pain over the last, well, quite a few months actually. It appears that I have either, like, a herniated disc or a protruding disc, and it's causing sciatic pain that, at the very beginning was, oh my gosh, almost debilitating. I couldn't sleep. It was awful. The pain would get up to, like, an eight or a nine on a 10-point scale. It was just brutal. And it really escalated of course, when I was traveling a ton and I didn't have time to get in to see a doctor or a physical therapist. And so I tried to Dr. Google myself into feeling better, and actually was probably making it worse because I was continuing to strength train. Anyway, finally did get in with a lovely physical therapist and it's been a hard pill for me to swallow, but I have listened because I really want to live pain-free, and I'm doing exactly what she's saying, and that means that I have had to stop doing a lot of the things that I love when it comes to my physical body.
So I've had to completely give up strength training for a while. I will be able to do it again, but no strength training for a while. And really just very limited, very specific exercises and I can continue to walk, so as many of you know, walking is, like, my favorite thing to do. But there for a while like, power walking or hiking or any sort of incline was out because it just made things worse, so I had to really slow down my walks. I was so grateful that I could still walk, but man, it was hard for me to really slow down. And in general, it's just been really, really hard for me to get back in my body, listen to my body, slow down, stop doing some things, and to take care of myself. But I'm doing it, and the reason I'm doing it is because, like I said, I want to live pain-free, and I want to get back to the things that I love to do in my self-described old lady body. And man, nothing makes you appreciate what you are able to do more than not being able to do the things that you love doing.
And I've really, really, really gotten back into my body through this process, and here's what I mean by that. I am paying very close attention to how I feel at all times. I am keeping meticulous notes of like, what makes me feel better, what makes it feel worse. When I don't sleep as well, can I trace it back? Did I maybe forget to do my stretches before bed? Did I maybe not do as many stretches as I normally do? Did I not drink enough water? There's just a whole slew of things for consideration. I actually also listened to Rachel Zoffness, Z-O-F-F-N-E-S-S, on Armchair Expert, which is a podcast that I really love hosted by Dax Shepard. She has a book called Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal, and one of the biggest takeaways was her advice to create your own kind of pain recipe, the things that you need to pay attention to in your own life to avoid pain. And it's not just the medicine and our physical therapist exercises. Oh, interesting. It's our whole everything, right? What we always talk about in terms of wellness. It was just such a stark reminder that actually I feel so much better when I drink enough water, when I allow myself space to pause throughout the day, when I am able to take a nice slow walk, when I actually, let me look. It's in the back of my Book of Delights, which I talked about last week. I have listed for myself what my own kind of recipe is to stay pain-free, and it's getting good sleep, and it's not eating food too close to bed. It's staying hydrated. It's eating adequate protein. It's doing my exercises from my physical therapist at least three times a day, in the morning, right before bed, and in the afternoon, if I can. It's walking. It's my morning journaling. It's keeping my nervous system relaxed. It's, oh, here's a big one for me, not sitting for too long. It's comfortable shoes. It's breathwork. It's carrying and using my lumbar pillow on flights and in cars. It is icing it and then following that up with heat. It's gentle, gentle Pilates and yoga. And it's just fascinating to me, once again, how all of those factors feed into my physical body and staying in tune with my body, loving my body, and wanting my body to be able to serve me in this job for a really long time and be able to do the things I love.
So, I hope maybe, I don't know, a few of you might relate to that and maybe pulled out an invitation in there to listen to your body, listen to your doctor, make the appointment, create your own recipe for what you need in order to stay pain-free. Hopefully, there's some nuggets in there that you can pull out and utilize for yourself. Me just saying it out loud is a good reminder of keep doing this, keep doing this, keep doing this and I can just keep adding to it and will be able to do more and more, but to not rush it because I don't want it to get worse. And I'm so grateful that I kept a meticulous log. For people that know me well, that will not surprise them. But it just, in my phone, I've kept a meticulous log of the pain, the pain levels, good days, bad days, and what I was doing, so I could find some of those patterns and recognize the slow improvement. It is slow. When friends ask how I'm doing, my first response is always like, "Meh, it's exactly the same." And then I go back and look, and it's not. It's getting better. I know this isn't going to happen, but I have in the back of my head that I'm just going to wake up and say, "It's perfect. Everything's perfect," and I know that's not true, so sometimes that slow progress is easy to miss. So keeping track of it, maybe there's an invitation there for you of, like, keeping track of your pain levels and what you're doing that's feeding into that or making it better. I just know so many of us deal with some chronic pain issues. I've got lots of friends with, ugh, backs that hurt, and just also sciatic pain is so, so, so very common. Headaches, tension, all of those pieces. So let's get back in our bodies. Let's pay attention to the whole big picture of what we need. Let's work on our kind of pain recipe, or I guess I want to call it a no-pain recipe. What do we know that we need so that we can really take care of our whole selves?
I am so grateful to Adrienne and Solution Tree and Marzano Resources and for you, this incredible squad. Thank you for being a safe place where I get to say the things and share the things in the hope that we can just help support each other. I hope we feel each other's hands on our backs, whether we're feeling good or we're in a little bit of pain or we're struggling, whatever that is, knowing that we're not alone and that we've got one another. I think just that sense of community is so incredibly important, and I'm so grateful that we have this here. I'm cheering so hard for you. Make it a great week. I love you.
If this episode resonated with you, find more physical wellness episodes here.
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