WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, fellow long hauler, psychologist and your long COVID coach. Welcome to the second edition of Wellness Wednesday. And this week, I wanted to start talking to you about the concept of listening to our bodies. And this is a concept that is central to long COVID recovery and shows up in so many different places thinking about pacing, thinking about work, thinking about interacting with friends. I want to share a little bit of an example that relates to work, and also illustrates a little bit that it's not just physical activity that we have to be careful of, but also cognitive and emotional activity and paying attention to what shows up in our bodies around those kinds of things can also be enormously informative in helping us move forward in our recovery journeys, particularly as we make decisions. And this is another issue that we talk a lot about treatment decisions, but also decisions about how much work to do, when to go back to work, which friends to see, how often we're all making decisions on a daily basis, which can also be exhausting.

So, the example that I wanted to share with you today, and I'll try and draw on kind of recent examples of things that are relevant to me that I have been through as we continue these videos weekly. Many of you know that I took vacation in August. In fact, I took the whole month of August off from work, something that is not easy to do. But I'm trying to take more and more vacation time to make sure that I'm resting and recovering and balancing my life between work and long COVID recovery, as well as all the fun things as well.

So I had planned to spend some time in London with family, go on a little vacation. And I was trying as little as possible to be involved with the day to day stuff that was still ongoing in the background with my business. I still had a couple of trainings that were happening in August that an associate of mine was doing the live portions of and I was just trying to step back and let my staff do as much as they could so that I could focus on my rest and my recovery.

And I flew to London. And gosh, I've done that flight now, four times, five times maybe with long COVID. And each time it is so interesting to notice the difference in terms of how I feel in response to being at altitude, and the jetlag, and all of those things that can have a huge toll on our bodies, even when we're physically well. This time I did better than any other flight that I've done since I've had long COVID. And the first couple of days in London, I was feeling pretty good. In fact, I was feeling so good that I was starting to think this is strange. What have I done differently? Why am I feeling so good? And you know how it gets a little bit we start to sort of question it or worry, oh my goodness, does this mean a crash is coming? All of those fun things that we go through when we're feeling good, and we can't just enjoy the feeling good.

So about three or four days into my trip, maybe five, and I woke up to find that overnight with all the different time differences, there had been quite a significant, let's say error in my business that had happened as a result of some of my staff dropping the ball on some important things. And suddenly, I felt absolutely exhausted. And it hit me what the difference had been.

I had not been working for the last four or five days. And suddenly when I was pulled in to fight fires and figure out what had gone wrong. And then, of course, that good old anger that had built up inside me about the mistakes that had been made. And all those lovely thoughts like, wow, why do I leave it to other people, I might as well just do it myself, etcetera, etcetera. That had really taken a toll on my nervous system and it was really impacting me symptomatically. And we know that this happens, we know that it happens time and again. And we're always being mindful of it. And yet, in the moment, it was so nice to be reminded, wait a second, this is why I'm feeling so much better because I haven't been dealing with all of this nonsense every minute of every day.

And I was sitting on the bus, going over to the city to have lunch with my sister, and thinking about my business, thinking about what I could possibly do about this, because I know for many of you, you are taking time out of work right now. And that's really important, and focusing on resting. And I know that financial worries continue to be something that we all deal with. I am thankfully at a point, although it's taken me a long time that I am able to work again full time. But it still obviously is taking a toll on my body and I need to be mindful of that. And so I was thinking, what do I need to do in my business to change this because this particular thing that had happened, it can't happen again. It keeps happening. And my body is telling me it can't happen again, I can't continue to make the recovery I want to make if I let it happen again.

And so I was mulling some things over in my mind. And what my gut was telling me was that this part of my business, I need to let go. And it's been something that I've been working on for a long, long time before I got COVID. Before I got long COVID, before I started working with people with long COVID. That was my career and I worked really hard to build up this business. And I was really proud of myself for that. And the idea of letting that go and walking away from it felt hard. And yet, every time that thought came into my mind, and my body exhaled, and I felt calm, and I felt good, and my body was saying, "Yes, please. Yes, please. Let's give that up."

And then I was thinking, well, goodness, this is actually a revenue stream for me, and I'm not sure financially I can justify giving it up. What can I do instead to off balance that and I'm sitting on the bus. And I'm also again, listening to my body and just kind of thinking and mulling it over. And it occurred to me, maybe I should just take on a few more private practice patients. And interestingly, with private practice patients, I've been noticing since this time, last year, when I was starting to get back into work again, that my Garmin numbers when I'm working with patients, just in that 45 minutes, I'm sitting and talking to them, I get lovely blue bars the whole time. So I knew that that made me feel better. So I got out my calculator did a little bit of quick maths calculation to figure out what would happen if I added a couple more patients between now and the end of the year, would that offset the money? Now I was surprised how much it was and how it probably would offset it. And, all the relief set in, my body felt so much better. And I met my sister for lunch, I'd already made the decision. I felt good. She was happy about that. So really what I'm trying to say here is it doesn't have to be about work. It doesn't have to be about being self-employed, or you know, any of the things that are very specific to me, although I know loads of you are also dealing with very similar issues. But what is the key thing that I've worked so hard over this last year and a bit as I've started to recover is paying attention to my body, paying attention to what shows up. Thinking about something, does it resonate? Thinking about something, does it make me feel good? And we can apply that across the board. And I'm going to come back to this concept time and again. But I just wanted to share with you because that had happened quite recently and it was the right decision.

So, encouraging you this week, right now if there's something on your mind, if there's something that you're trying to make a decision about. Just check in with your body. What's your gut feeling? Mull over in your head. Add the different possible options. See what shows up here. The one that makes you exhale and breathe a sigh of relief and feel good. That's the one that we're going for.

I hope you have a tolerable rest of your week and I will see you next Wednesday for another Wellness Wednesday. Take care.