The journey from chronic illness to recovery is often the most difficult experience that people will have in their lives, due to the many obstacles that stand in the way, each of which with the potential to slow, or prevent, progress to better health.
One such obstacle to recovery is the innate tendency, that all humans have, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. Whether or not you’re conscious about this tendency, you’re certainly aware of how it manifests.
Our innate tendency to seek comfort and avoid discomfort
When you seek comfort, you tend to do things that you’re familiar with. You eat the same foods that you’ve been eating for years, for example, because you’re familiar with these foods. You know how they taste, that you like them, and that you feel good after eating them.
Conversely, when you avoid discomfort, you tend to avoid doing things that you’re unfamiliar with. You avoid trying new foods, because you’re unfamiliar with these foods, or you avoid eliminating certain foods from your diet, because not eating these foods is unfamiliar.
This innate tendency, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort, is an obstacle for everyone with chronic illness. What makes overcoming this obstacle particularly difficult is that even if you know what changes you need to make in your life to catalyze your recovery, the human instinct to seek comfort and avoid discomfort is so powerful that you can find yourself coming up with all sorts of reasons why it’s okay for you to put off making these changes.
You tell yourself that you’ll stop eating processed foods next week, because it’s socially inconvenient for you to make the change this week. But then next week rolls around, and it turns out it’s socially inconvenient then as well.
You aren’t flawed for not being able to make unprecedented changes in your life. Everyone with chronic illness experiences difficulty in making such changes. It’s important to recognize, however, that recovery from chronic illness requires getting comfortable with discomfort. That attempting to avoid discomfort in the short-term sets you up for more discomfort in the long-term.
How working with a health coach can help you to embrace discomfort
Embracing the inevitability of discomfort on your recovery journey isn’t easy, which is why I’m an advocate for working with a health coach, so that you don’t have to go through the experience alone. No one should have to go through the most difficult experience of their lives alone.
Perhaps there are a few practitioners that you go to, but if the extent of your interaction with them is limited to a 15-minute appointment every year, or every six months, then you’re effectively on your own to figure everything out that you didn’t have time to cover in your appointment.
If you need help developing a strategy for eliminating processed foods from your diet, or help maintaining your commitment to your new diet, the practitioners you see infrequently, and only briefly, probably aren’t going to be able to offer much. They either don’t have the time, or don’t have the training, to provide support and accountability as you go through the discomfort of making significant changes in your life. And that’s quite okay, because your practitioners can’t do everything, and this is where a health coach can be helpful.
By working with a health coach, you’re in a much better position to make the changes you need to make to resolve your symptoms and recover your health. A health coach walks alongside you on your recovery journey, every step of the way, helping to both guide and motivate you through the many obstacles that you inevitably encounter, so that you don’t have walk this journey alone.
What health coaches do
Whereas conventional practitioners are trained to use medication to suppress symptoms, health coaches are trained to use natural therapies—diet, supplements, and lifestyle—to address the causes and improve overall health. They recognize that resolving chronic symptoms requires a personalized approach, given the uniqueness of physiology, and accordingly design an actionable health plan specific to you and your symptoms.
Health coaches are also trained in human behavior and motivation, using methods such as positive psychology to help you imagine what it would look like to achieve your health goals, and then help you to create a strategy to get there. They understand that the effectiveness of your health plan is contingent on your ability to implement it, and thus focus equally on action as they do information.
Many health coaches also proactively check in with the people they’re working with, in between appointments, to provide encouragement, and to answer any questions that might come up. Having someone regularly check in who knows what you’re going through, who recognizes the discomfort of making the changes you’re making, can be profoundly motivating as you move forward on your journey to better health.
How embracing discomfort can lead to a positive feedback loop
While it’s not easy to make unprecedented changes in your life, given how powerful the human instinct is to seek comfort and avoid discomfort, working with a health coach can help you to eventually acclimate to the discomfort of doing things that you’re unfamiliar with.
And doing things that you’re unfamiliar with isn’t just important—it’s nonnegotiable.
Your recovery requires it.
You won’t be able to move forward on your journey to better health unless you get comfortable with the discomfort of doing new things, whether that’s eliminating processed foods from your diet, eating only organic foods, fasting regularly, taking certain vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and phytonutrients, exercising every day, getting to bed before midnight, reducing exposure to blue light in the evening, or using a sauna. Or all of the above.
A health coach can not only help you to determine what changes you need to make, to address the causes of your symptoms, but they can also help you to implement those changes, until, at some point, your symptoms start to improve, and a positive feedback loop sets in, and your comfort zone expands to include the new behaviors that were previously difficult for you to maintain.
In a positive feedback loop, the more you experience symptom improvement, the more inclined you are to continue to adhere to the changes you’ve made that contributed to such improvement, which then leads to further symptom improvement, and so on. Whereas eliminating processed foods from your diet was, at the outset, quite a difficult change to make, you eventually become uninterested in eating these foods. Perhaps you no longer think of processed foods as actual food, and you can’t imagine eating anything that requires a factory to produce. Not eating processed foods becomes part of your identity, and part of your life, as do the many other new health-promoting behaviors that you’ve adopted, each contributing in some way to your recovery.
If you need help determining what changes you need to make to resolve your symptoms, support and accountability as you implement those changes, and someone to walk alongside you on your journey to better health, you can schedule a call to learn more about Quantify membership and how we can help you to resolve your symptoms and optimize your health.