Discouragement: 'I Feel Stuck'
By Bruce Campbell
Being in a situation in which you seem to lack control can create a strong sense of helplessness. By undermining your motivation to try new approaches, a sense of helplessness can create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But, just as feelings of pessimism and despair can be learned in response to experience, so can optimism and productive effort. Here are six ways.
Take Small Steps Daily
One way to silence the voice that says "nothing works" is to have success experiences. Just as discouragement undermines self-esteem, mastery rebuilds it. One technique for creating success experiences is to set a series of realistic short-term goals. The key is to be very specific in stating your goal and to make sure that goal is realistic.
Specific means that a goal is concrete and measurable. For example, rather than saying "I want to get more rest," you say "I will rest 15 minutes in the late morning on four days in the coming week." To test whether your goal is realistic, ask yourself how confident you are on a scale to 0 to 10 that you can complete your target. If your confidence level is less than 8, restate your goal in less ambitious terms.
You can make a target in practically any area of life. Here are some examples used by people in our program.
Rest for 20 minutes each: late morning and mid-afternoon
Taking scheduled rests is one of the most common targets used by people in our groups.
Go to bed by 10 pm
A common target for people who want to re-establish a more normal routine after staying up later and later.
Get off computer after 30 minutes
You can set a target not to do something or to set a limit on how much you do.
Read a book for pleasure
This target was used by a person who thought that the demands of family and illness had squeezed all the pleasure out of her life. It may seem paradoxical to schedule pleasure, but it worked.
Cognitive Therapy
Cognitive therapy offers a proven way to lift depressive thoughts by changing thinking to make it more positive and more realistic. You can learn cognitive therapy on your own or with the help of a therapist. In the former category, we like the book Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky. Other books with a similar approach include Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman and Feeling Good by David Burns.
Cognitive therapy helps you to recognize overly pessimistic thoughts and, over time, replace them with more realistic ideas about your situation. You do this by identifying negative thoughts, examining them for reasonableness (asking yourself to what extent the thoughts are valid) and finally by proposing a new understanding of your experience. The goal is to learn to see your situation in an accurate, yet hopeful, manner, retraining your habits of thought in a more realistic direction.
(Cognitive therapy is explained in more detail in the article Taming Stressful Thoughts.)
Get Help
If you are seriously depressed, suicidal or have been depressed for some time, get help now. Phone a suicide prevention center, talk to your doctor, see a psychologist or call a friend. If your situation is not urgent but depression reduces your ability to do your normal daily activities, you should consider professional help: counseling, medications or both.
A therapist can provide an outside view of your situation, help you to accept your illness and support you in your efforts to improve. If you have family tension because of illness, couples or family counseling can be helpful.
Find Models of Success
Knowing that there are other people with CFS and FM who are improving can reduce discouragement by providing inspiration and practical tips. You may find such people in your local support group or in an online group. Such people provide models of successful coping, thus dispelling fear and counteracting helplessness. For some online examples, see our Success Stories.
Be Your Own Cheerleader
Most people with CFS and FM have better and worse days. Just reminding ourselves that all days are not equally bad can reduce discouragement. Also, asking "what makes some days better?" can boost self-esteem by reminding us of things we already do that help. Remembering can lead to doing more of what helps.
Remembering the idea that progress with CFS and FM is gradual (1% or 2% a month), one person in our program says that whenever she gets discouraged, she tells herself, "One percent is not too much, I can find something I can do today that will move me forward." For some examples of small steps that bring progress, see the article The 1% Solution.
Count Your Blessings: Focus on Gratitude
Scientific research has shown that expressing gratitude improves health. In one study by Robert Emmons, a group that each week wrote five things they were grateful for felt better about their lives overall, were more optimistic about the future, and reported fewer health problems than members of control groups.
Another study reproduced the results among a group of people suffering from various neuromuscular diseases, including post-polio syndrome, which has symptoms similar to those of CFS. People using daily gratitude journals reported more satisfaction with their lives and were more optimistic about the future than the control group. Interestingly, the gratitude group also reported getting more sleep, spending less time awake before falling asleep and feeling more refreshed in the morning.
For more about the research on gratitude and how to start a gratitude practice, see the article Counting Your Blessings: How Gratitude Improves Your Health . For one person's experience with a gratitude journal, see Joan Buchman's The Healing Power of Gratitude.
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