When Pain Becomes a Signal: Change Your Response

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 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.

How Life’s Toughest Moments Built My Real Confidence

My life was very different then, and I don’t mean my job or where I lived or what person I was. I mean that the way the world around me behaved was different, and by that, I mean the way that the world interacted with me was different. And I mean different in a bad way.

My life just wasn't going the way I wanted it to. That included the things that came from me—the things that I tried to do—but also the things that just happened to me, the things that were out of my control. And despite what I did, I was powerless to change my situation, and I felt just helpless, like a passenger watching a movie of my own life but knowing that my actions wouldn't change the storyline.

I found myself in situations that I had unwittingly started, either by accidentally saying something or by doing something that upset the people around me. And this gave me a lot of trouble when all I wanted was to get along with people and have good relationships. And in those situations, as I tried to fix things, the worse they got because the people involved wouldn't understand what I was saying, and there was no way to make things right.

Everything I said just dug the hole deeper and deeper until I just had to give up and accept that the person was going to be upset and feel hurt by me, which was the exact opposite of what I wanted. At the best of times, it is nearly impossible to change someone's mind about what they think or feel about something, but as these situations arose in my life, I could clearly see the futility of even trying. It was like they were being controlled to not see reason or think logically about what I was saying.

I would get an increasingly familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. A horrible churning feeling, beyond shock, that would make my head feel numb. And on top of that, when I was in those situations, I also felt confused, and I couldn't think clearly at all.

I couldn't find any strategy to deal with it except to just wait until it was over. And even though I knew it was me that had triggered it, I knew that I wouldn't be able to stop it happening again in the future no matter how careful I was. And sure enough, I would say or do something again that sparked a different but all too familiar situation.

Luckily though, these situations didn't happen every day, every week, or even every month. But I dreaded them happening again, and I was always looking out for situations where they could happen. Of course, these were the extreme situations that came into my life, but as I said, the general flow of my life wasn't really positive either.

That's not to say that good things didn't happen, but the good things were just a little something to pick me up before the next thing put me down again. It was a period of my life that really built or rebuilt my character. Of course, I was still the same person, but it started a change in me.

I'm definitely thicker-skinned now and more confident. But it's not that empty confidence that a lot of people seem to have. , that confidence which is just an act that people put on to look better than they really are.

It's a deep-seated confidence right from inside here. And I can definitely deal with situations better because when stressful situations come up, and I have to make quick decisions, I am able to keep calm and think clearly, and most importantly, be more objective. And I couldn't be this person now if I hadn't gone through that difficult period of my life.