Celebrating Your Chronic Wellness Wins - Why It is Important to Living Chronically Well
When you are doing your best to stay afloat with chronic illness symptoms, it can be counterintuitive to pause to celebrate your wellness practice wins.
It might feel strange to take a moment to recognize what you are doing to care for yourself when it feels like a small drop of effort into a big bucket of chronic illness challenges.
When you are facing some daunting challenges due to chronic illness, it might seem odd to stop and commend yourself for your meditation practice. Or, for taking your medicine today. Or, for taking a shower.
But, I want to invite you to do just that - recognize and celebrate your wins!
It is an important part of living Chronically Well. It also involves the biggest unkept secret in health coaching that you can use to be successful in your health and wellness goals!
How can celebrating your wins be so important?
Here Are 4 Reasons Why -
ONE: Because your wins matter
When you make slow and steady efforts to incorporate a wellness practice into your life, the effort itself can be a big deal, especially when you are not feeling well. Big or small, any efforts and positive impacts you create in your life and health are progress. They are worthy of recognition. These efforts and wins reflect forward momentum towards developing healthy habits or practices that sustain you and your health. When you find yourself in the position of having a small win or reaching a big milestone, celebrate it!
TWO: Because it can be hard to make progress
Even if you have an iron will, sometimes life and symptoms can get in the way of healthy goals and practices. When you make efforts that slowly move you in the right direction, that deserves some recognition. Any efforts are progress, even if noticeable change is slow.
THREE: Because recognizing your successes instills confidence and keeps you motivated
Recognizing your wins can help to keep you on track with whatever you are doing to care for yourself. And, you leverage neuroscience to your advantage! Neuroscientific studies show that noticing the positive impact of our efforts reinforces further action and leads to success in reaching goals. It actually assists in behavior change. If you are looking to fuel your motivation to keep going, notice and celebrate your wins!
For more info on how to implement a wellness practice with confidence, check out this blog post.
FOUR: Because you deserve to balance out the difficulties of chronic illness with some recognition of your wins
Chronic illness can lead us to feel powerless sometimes. Our diagnosis and symptoms may be outside of our control. Juggling life with chronic illness can be tough. But, when you develop habits or practices that support and nourish you, you are empowering yourself. You are taking action to love and care for yourself as you are right now. You deserve to recognize and celebrate that! Celebrating your efforts is a great way to balance out the tougher parts of chronic illness.
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The biggest unkept secret of health coaching is that small, realistic steps toward a goal builds success. Success builds confidence. Confidence results in more sustainable habits over time. And, the result of that can lead to positive shifts (and even transformation!) in your life and health.
A NOTE ON Negativity Bias
As part of the human condition, we tend to focus most of our attention on what we perceive to be our shortcomings rather than our strengths. This is because humans are hard-wired with a negativity bias. It is thought that negativity bias evolved in early humans as a mechanism to protect from threats - meaning, don’t eat the wrong berry or pet that tiger because you might not make it to warn the others.
But, when it comes to making habit changes in the modern day, negativity bias can be a challenge that doesn’t necessarily save our lives. In many circumstances, it can actually be counterproductive. Negativity bias can cause us to be hard on ourselves to the point that we might be too demoralized to keep doing the very things that support our underlying health and wellness. To counteract this, make an effort to notice your wins!
PRO TIP:
Acknowledge your efforts and accomplishments! I find that most of my clients overlook when they are doing something well or have accomplished a goal. They tend to focus on where they perceive themselves to be falling short. or, They start looking ahead to the next steps - even after accomplishing something huge. I like to pause with them to notice their efforts and accomplishments from time to time. This usually changes their mood, their confidence and their resolve.
I hope this post prompts you to recognize all that you are doing to nurture yourself on your chronic illness journey.
When you are implementing a wellness practice into your life, or doing something to nurture yourself, remember to celebrate it! This could mean recognizing a shift in your thinking or accomplishing an action step in the direction of your goal - no matter how small.
Taking time to recognize your efforts doesn’t require everything to look pretty and result in perfection. It means taking some time to reflect on what is going well or keeping you moving in the right direction.
Congratulate yourself. And, know that neuroscience will help you to keep going if you keep up the positive reinforcement!
When you think about what you are doing well, how does that impact your confidence level to keep going?
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