I listen to a lot of people in daily life who think that their health issues started overnight, how they hadn’t felt anything wrong then one day woke up in a chronic disease state. But this isn’t true, when I’m taking case histories I hear how they have had IBS or digestive issues on and off for years, heartburn was the norm, that they take Omeprazole daily, that they are taking blood pressure tablets. How they can no longer eat anything spicy, and how they are easily fatigued. We continually ignore the signals and run roughshod over our body’s signs that something is wrong, that headache each evening, the skin rashes that keep appearing, the weight that just won’t shift. Often I’m pulling out this detail one by one, giving me a deeper understanding how this sudden change in health really wasn’t so sudden, in fact, it was incremental.
It’s the boiling the frog slowly syndrome really, where the frog has no idea anything is wrong until it’s too late and the water is too hot for it. Recently I was talking to a friend who said her house had become out of control with how messy it now was, she said she hadn’t noticed until she came in one day and she could no longer cope with how it was. Incrementally it changed and she felt fine with those changes until they made life too difficult for her to handle.
Incrementally ill is a slow creep of change that most people either don’t acknowledge or don’t notice and just live with. It’s the ill health that we only notice when it’s become too bad to cope well with, and we look back in hindsight on once we’ve become well and can do things easily again wondering how on earth we coped.
But when we get chronically ill we want a fast fix, we don’t have time to stop for this health issue we’ve created over long stretches of time, we need it resolving now. Ignoring the fact that the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years have been showing you signs that you are incrementally becoming unwell, but wanting the now chronic health issue to be resolved as fast as possible is another way of putting pressure on your body at a time when it least needs it. This is the time to realise that you need to become incrementally well, incrementally healthy by doing healthy habits daily. The small stuff matters, it’s not the big new year’s resolution that makes the biggest difference, can you remember last years? It’s the daily rituals we have that make us and our health what it is. The juice we take time to make, the supplements we take, the vegetables with each meal, the discipline we have, the positive mindset, the right amount of sleep and the ever needed exercise that helps us to become our best and stay incrementally well. It’s our Passport to Change.
