Starting and Managing Your Business with Chronic Pain

Understanding the Business Journey

When Starting and Running a Business it’s important to factor in and consider your overall health.  It’s also very important for those who are dealing with Chronic diseases,  Illnesses, or Pain.

Those of us dealing with chronic pain, disease, or illness – know that it’s not fun, or easy.  Life can become very overwhelming, and create or add more stress to our daily life.

Early on in life I was taught to ‘live with it, deal with it, you’ll be ok’ having aches, pains, etc…

Had I known then what I know now I would have done things very differently!

I probably would have:

1. Ate better.
2. Gotten my rest.
3. Decreased my alcohol intake.
4. Exercised more/partied less.
5. And would have made better choices when I was younger.

It’s not easy living with Chronic Illness

Living with a chronic disease or illness and being in Pain hasn’t been easy.   It’s been a very painful road!

There have been times when I’ve gotten so sick of being in pain that I want to hurt myself…

But I have a beautiful life & family that thank God I find the strength to take a breather and rethink my life and STOP & find ways to unstress to relieve the pain.

Immediate signs:

Those of you that go through this know that we tend to:

1. Go on a hunger strike.
2. Get easily depressed.
3. Stop eating well.
4. Start overworking.
5. And we stop the self-care.

Not because we choose to, but sometimes our willpower to move ahead gets shattered!

You see, I’ve always suffered from medical issues caused by anemia, stress, depression, anxiety, and pain (The first auto accident at the age of 15).

So when you add the Real Life Stresses; family, kids, business, life, daily ups/downs, it can trigger your pains even more!

Have you read the previous article that I wrote in 2017  Depression is a Killer?

In this post I talk about some of my internal issues and how I quickly learned how some of these aches and pains were being triggered, and that I needed to get some help!

Furthermore, I learned that there are many things we can do to help us get through life and help us with both our life and business.  Check out this post I talk more about it in the article:  Your Health is Your Business 

Did you know that sometimes dealing with constant health concerns can actually prepare you for the ups and downs of business and life?

I invite you to read this amazing article: Business.com where they spoke with a few entrepreneurs who actually live with similar challenges and they shared some tips on how to manage their businesses and life.

Check out the article, you will love it!

As for me, I learned to listen to my body, but I’m not going to lie after years of abuse, it’s still very difficult to stay on track, but I try every day! Check out this article where I share some tips about Physical and Emotional Health

Learn to Listen to your body and do Selfcare!!!

If you’re like me who’s running a business you know that it’s mentally and physically exhausting, and the risk of overworking yourself will happen daily. Therefore learning to listen to your body and learning how to manage your chronic conditions, and paying attention to your symptoms becomes a vital part of being able to continue working.

“If you neglect your health in the long term for a short-term business need, you may find that you’ve created bigger long-term problems for yourself,” warns Kyle Brost. 

Little background:

I’ve been suffering from autoimmune disorders for over 30 years, unfortunately, I didn’t know until just recently. I was diagnosed just a few years ago, after I pressured my doctors to review all my medical history with me, yeah, go figure!

So, for the past 5 years, I’ve been learning new ways to stay healthy, and trying to pay close and careful attention to what both my business, my life, and my body needs.

Analyzing my capabilities, my strengths, my needs is crucial in order to adjust my workload when possible, rather than pushing myself to the extreme!  And although I’m not always successful I know I have to try in order to avoid getting sick!

It’s very important and at times very hard to be in tune with how I’m feeling; my workload, daily life ups/downs, and notice when things may be headed downhill and I try to stop it, but that’s not always the case.

My family and I know that when this happens, I need to start taking the necessary steps to prevent it from getting worse, unfortunately, we are human 🙂 and of course, that’s not always the case, and make the mistake of pushing myself till the end – NO BUENO!

Managing stress levels

We all know that having high levels of stress can often make chronic health and pain problems worse. But controlling the stress “is easier said than done, right?”

Therefore paying attention to your stress, both in business and in life, is a must!

After all those of us with kiddos, we know that being healthy and active is a must in order to care for our kiddos, right!

Starting in 2015 after lots of research I learned that I had to start listening to and understanding my triggers because these triggers will also cause flare-ups.

My flare-ups are caused by; the food I eat to the stress I have, from being overweight, to not eating or resting well, and of course, overworking has been my main trigger!

Triggers

So keeping your stress to a minimal level is a must!

1. Staying away from the “toxic people”, even if it’s family
2. Delegating your work both home and business
3. Creating a routine/plan
4. Controlling your workload/flow both home/business is a must
5. Understanding and being ok with the fact that NOT ALL days will be easy

Manage Your Time

One of the many illnesses that I’ve been diagnosed with is; Fibromyalgia, RA, Lupus, and Chronic Pain just to name a few.

Therefore, understanding that having these medical conditions will cause sudden flare-ups and trying to “be superwoman” and not taking breaks will cause pain and will put me out of work!

More importantly, it’s not fair for my family to keep going through my aches/pains because I refuse to LISTEN TO MY BODY!

So, listen and take some of these basic and simple steps:

1. Take a breather
2.  Go for a walk
3. Listen to some music
4. Quick exercise; yoga, meditation, stretching
5. Create a system for both life and business and DO IT!

Reminders:

Always ask yourself: How precious are our time and health? It’s a valuable resource and therefore should be treated as such.

We also have a tendency to test our limits and push ourselves and maybe that was ok when we were young, but in the end, as we get older we start paying the price…

If you’re young and healthy take care of yourself.   If you’re (like me) older and in pain then start listening to your body and create a plan, and change your way of life.

Finally and super importantly SEEK HELP if you’re in pain or suffering from chronic pain – you are NOT ALONE on this journey!

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