Has it ever occured to you that self love is key to healing from an autoimmune condition? It didn’t to me until recently. Listen to this episode to get some self love tips to help you really love yourself and in turn start your real journey to healing from autoimmunity. If you don’t really love yourself, then your autoimmunity will never really go away.
Self Love for Autoimmune Transcript
?Hello ladies. This is Anna Laura Brown, and welcome to this episode of the Autoimmune Rehab Podcast. Find and listen to all of the episodes@autoimmunerehab.com. Feel like you need a little bit more self-care in your life. Then why not grab your free copy of my self-care journal.
online@annalaurabrown.com slash selfcare, and that’s ANNALAURAbrown.com/selfcare, and I will also link to that in the show notes as well. Okay, let’s get started. So for today’s topic, I’m gonna share with you what is on my mind and heart as it relates to self-love and self-care when you have an autoimmune condition.
So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna talk with you a little bit about what I’ve learned about the importance of self-love and self-care. I’m gonna share with you some things from a book called The Loving Diet that I found really, really helpful. Also mention a little bit about some of the research and some of the stories that I have read and heard about, and terms of how self-love in your self-image can, can impact your autoimmunity as well as other aspects of your health.
Share a little bit about the mind body connection and some ideas for affirmations, some self-love tips. In other words, just some advice and things about how self-care and self-love can play a role in your autoimmune rehab or your autoimmune healing journey. Okay, so let’s get started. So first of all, I have been on this hashimoto.
Healing journey really since about January of 2018. That was when I was first diagnosed. Now the naturopathic doctor that found it was the third doctor I had been to, to try and get some help with my thyroid issues, and he finally figured it out. He was actually a naturopathic doctor. I had had two other medical doctors that had completely missed it, and this is pretty normal for a lot of people with autoimmune conditions.
Unfortunately, you typically have to go to multiple doctors to finally get an answer in any case. So I, you know, like I said, likely have had hashing modals as of the date of this recording. I’ve known about it for almost five years now, but I probably had it for at least four to five years before that.
And during this journey of healing that I have been on, I have discovered that while diet, lifestyle, healthy habits, those kinds of things definitely do play a role when it comes to. Your autoimmune healing, your autoimmune wellness, that kind of thing. Understanding the role that self-care and self-love plays can be just as important, if not more important to your overall healing, because the reality is that if you have an autoimmune condition, there’s something that has gone awry in your life.
In addition to your physical part, there’s also an emotional part, whether that’s, you know, you had some sort of trauma that happened to you, or you know, you’ve struggled with self-love, self-care, so body image, self-esteem, those kinds of things. And so it’s really, really important to take a look at those aspects and how those may be contributing to your autoimmune disorder.
A couple of things for you to think about. The first thing is the role that the mind and the body have because what you believe about yourself and your life can have a big impact on your health, including any autoimmune conditions you have. . And now I’d like to share with you a couple of parts from, I said this book, the Loving Diet, going Beyond Paleo into the Heart of What Ails You by Jessica Flanagan.
And I’m gonna start by reading a couple sentences that she has from the introduction of her book, and I will include the information on her book in Shall Shell Notes. So don’t worry, you’ll. That access to that, you can go look up, find that book that’s available on Amazon and other places as well. But here’s what she says and it’s part of the intro.
The Loving Diet will both help you assess your illness and make it an alley rather than an obstacle, and teach you to eat in a way that aligns with you, your inner healing and your inner teacher. You’ll completely alter your relationship with your disease. You may not realize it just yet, but you already have all the tools inside of you to come into cooperation with you.
You just need to tap into them. That is really the secret sauce. It is not a process to increase happiness and health. It is an awakening process. And she goes on to talk more and more all about the role that Awakening has and the role that loving yourself has in autoimmunity. Now, in this book, she does also talk about things like diet, lifestyle, getting the right healthcare, working with the right doctors, that kind of thing as well.
So it’s not like this book is all about. Kumbaya do, just love yourself and have a good self-image, and then everything will be fine and dandy. But she just points out the fact that a lot of us, you know, we focus a little bit too much on diet and we forget about some of the other aspects of our life, which includes our emotional wellbeing, our self-image, our self care, self-love, all of those things.
And those things are really, really important. aspects to any kind of autoimmune healing journey. Okay, so then the next part that I wanted to share with you is in, let’s see, here it is in chapter four, entitled Love Your Struggle. Illness is a Grace in Disguise, and one of the things that she talks about, which is something else that I found to be really helpful, is the concept of having and using I affirmations.
So here are examples of a couple affirmations that she has in the book. I am doing the best I can under difficult circumstances. This is hard right now, but this is temporary. Today is a pretty hard day to be a human, but things will get better and a couple other affirmations that I’ve used is that I have a happy, healthy thyroid.
My body is happy and healthy and supports me. I practice self-loving and self-care and healthy emotions at all times. Different things like that. So I recommend you come up with a couple of different affirmations that you can use, that you can read out loud and things that can really help you when you feel like you’re really struggling with maybe some of your self-image or self-love, that kind of thing.
Then the other thing I wanted to share with you was just an example of a story that I heard. I’ve heard it a couple times. You could probably Google it and find the exact information on the story that demonstrates the power of affirmations. And the general idea behind it was that there was a study that was done where they took some different plants and they.
Some of the plants. They took the plants and they watered the plants. They cared for the plants, but they also read. Really high, strong, positive affirmations to the plants and told them how great they were, how beautiful they were, how flowering they were, how lovely they were, all that kind of thing. And then the other set of plants, they also still watered them and took care of them, but they yelled at the plants and told the plants that they were bad and ugly and terrible.
And they did this for, I believe, I can’t remember if it was 30 days, it was at least 30 days, maybe 60. And at the end of that study, the plants that they had spoken positive words and affirmations to had grown and thrived and were beautiful and flowing and doing great, whereas the plants that they had yelled at and told them that they were ugly and fat and not good, those plants just shrink up and then eventually died.
And so the reality is that it’s not just. the US as human beings that can benefit from it, from its, but it’s also plants and other aspects of. , you know, nature and that kind of thing. And I’ve recently heard somebody say, you know the old saying that you’ve probably heard that Stix and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
That was extremely wrong. Those words can and do hurt you. And a lot of times the words that we say to ourselves, As human beings or things that we would never say to our friends and family or anybody else that we know. And so that goes into another aspect is you wanna be really, really careful about what kinds of words you use and what you say to yourself.
Okay, so then moving on. Here are a few other steps and tips that she has in this book. It says, steps toward loving the Meyer and the mug. Practice self-care. Trust the timing of your life. Know that you’re always on the right path. Know that bad things happening doesn’t equal a bad life. Understand that suffering is part of being human.
You don’t have to like your disease, appreciate your life instead. And then she has some exercises here on acceptance that include things like deep breathing, meditation, all that kind of thing. And so let’s talk a little bit more about some of the strategies, tips, and things for self-love, self-care.
So the first strategy is to truly believe in and love yourself. And if you’re really struggling with this, in some cases you may even need to get professional help therapy, that kind of thing. But I promise that you really can do it, and it really can help improve your autoimmunity. Then the next thing to think about is that stress makes autoimmune conditions worse, and it can manifest itself in a lot of different ways.
So for example, with me personally, I only have rashes when I’m really, really stressed. So if I all of a sudden start seeing a rash that starts breaking out, a lot of times it’ll break out somewhere on like one of my arms or my neck or my thyroid area. Then I know that it’s because I’m under a lot of stress.
Now granted, you can have rashes as a result of a gut imbalance, a food issue, other things like that. I don’t want you to misunderstand me and think that rashes are only because of stress, but because I really watch what I eat, I take good quality supplements, things like that, I’m well aware and in tune with my body.
To know that when I get rashes, it means that I’m under stress. And so, you know, that’s just something that over time you need to figure out and continue to work on and to learn, and you will discover it, how those things manifest themselves, the farther along you get in this autoimmune journey. Okay. Then the next thing I want you to think about is how you can strive for balance or an improved balance, I should say, in 12 different areas of your life that are on what’s called the Wheel of Life.
And a lot of us think of, you know, our health really only being impacted by the main areas of food and exercise. You know, maybe sleep might come into play, different things like that. But this wheel of life also points. Other aspects could have a big impact on our health. Things like home cooking, our social life, our spirituality, which you know, isn’t necessarily based on religion, but it can be our social life, our relationships, our home environment, our joy.
You know, how much joy that you have in your life, things like that. And so it’s important to strive to see if you can. A little bit more balanced in some of these areas. Also, things like career, your finances, your education. Now education doesn’t necessarily mean formal education as well. It could mean, you know, how are you doing as far as ongoing learning, you know, striving to become a better person, self-development, self-improvement, learning new things on a regular basis.
So you know, it may be worthwhile for you to take time to stop and assess yourself in these different areas. You know, maybe you’ll find some different holes and gaps that you can work on improving and in return those may improve your self-love and cause you know, some changes in your life. Overall health as well.
Okay, so then the other statements that I’ve also read a couple different places that I wanted to point out is that inflammatory thoughts create inflammatory bodies. And I really love this and want you to think even more about this. So if you are inflammatory. Thoughts and bad thoughts, that in turn creates inflammation in the body.
Hmm. Something that some of you may not have thought, and some of you, you know, may be listening to this and have a tendency to maybe disagree with me a little bit, but I want you to think about that again. Inflammatory thoughts create inflammatory bodies. So what you think, you manifest to a large degree and become a reality.
And if you think that everything with your health is falling apart and terrible, then you’re gonna manifest that in your physical health. Okay, so now let’s move on, and I’d like to share with you a couple of self-love tips that I have found helpful to increasing my self-love, self-image, that kind of thing. So the first thing is to limit my time on social media, even though, you know, I obviously have this podcast, have a health coaching business and also in the essential oil supplement business.
You know, so I can’t choose to really. Participate or not be on social media for any long period of time, just because I need it for business purposes. But what I have started doing is really limiting my time on their scheduling, planning in advance, telling myself that I’m not gonna spend more than an hour a day on social media unless I am, you know, actively engaging in conversation with people about something.
So, you know, just really cutting back on that. And one of the other things that I’ve done that’s really helped is. uninstalled the Facebook app and some of my other LinkedIn, some of my other social media apps for my phone, and I only have them on my iPad. So you know, if I’m on the goal and I’m wanting to check something or you know, upload or whatever, I have to actually turn on and go to my iPad to do it, and it makes it much easier.
Track and time, how much time I’m really spending. It’s not just on my phone where I can just mindlessly scroll Facebook and say, oops, that was a couple hours lost. Okay, so then the other thing that can really help is doing meditation on a regular basis. There are a lot of different devices and apps out there that you can find.
You know, I don’t necessarily know that I have a favorite to recommend, but the idea is that you just wanna practice meditation and mindfulness on a regular basis. Then also journaling can be really, really helpful. Now you can do journaling in the sense that you can just get out a blank piece of paper and pin and start writing whatever comes to your mind and you know, maybe it’s good, bad, whatever.
Maybe throw it away, maybe save the journal. You can use journals that contain prompts to invite you to think about different things that you may wanna write down. You know, just lots of different options out there for what you. Do journaling, but I definitely recommend that you do it at least, uh, a couple times a week, but daily if possible.
The other thing is asking yourself and others what your best qualities are. So ask other people to point out what your best qualities are because then turn, they can then turn around and help you realize, Hey, I’m gonna have. I’m a much better person and I’m good at this, and I’m good at that, you know, and instead of dwelling on what’s wrong with you, then the other thing is to also take actions that show yourself you love yourself.
So, for example, if you really love yourself and you know that there are certain foods you shouldn’t have, because those create inflammation in your body and cause problems with your autoimmunity, you’ll be willing to give up those foods and not eat them because you know that they’re just not good for you.
Then last but not least, ask God to help you have a better self image and to see yourself as he sees you. Now I realize some of you may come from different faiths, different backgrounds. Personally, I believe that I was created in God’s image and that God views me as a powerful daughter of God. And if I really truly, you know, dig down deep and say, Hey, you know, God loves me and God views me this way, then I will try to have self-love and self -image.
because it’s based on the fact that God loves me and my savior, Jesus Christ loves me. Now, if that’s not your belief system, that’s fine, but you still want to focus on, you know, maybe there’s a different higher power, whatever it is, realizing that you can be involved. That is helping you to have a better self image.
So anyhow, hopefully this episode has given you some additional food for thought, if you will, literally about self-love and self-care and the role that those play in autoimmunity. And if you have any further questions or would like to reach out and contact me, you’ll find some links in the show notes to connect with me on Instagram or on my blog website.
And take care, and I look forward to talking to you next week and to being able to help you out on this autoimmune journey. Would you like some more personalized one-on-one and group help from me? I’m going to be launching my very own online autoimmune rehab course within the next couple months, and I’m looking for beta testers to help me make this course the best it can possibly be, and for people who just don’t wanna join a waitlist to be notified when it will be available.
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