Your Life Lived Well

Stress is a part of life. Sometimes, it’s even a good part of life. It’s always there, so we must learn better strategies to cope. In this episode, we’ll discover what stress really is, distinguish between its helpful and harmful forms, and learn so better ways for dealing with it.

Fear is part of being human. We’ve all experienced it — whether we admit it or not. But for such a common experience, we misunderstand it far more than we realize. This episode is a deep dive into what fear really is and what it’s doing for us. It’s also about how to make fear your friend.

“Burnout” is rampant in the healthcare and caregiving professions. “Compassion fatigue” strikes even the most devoted loved ones and caregivers. These can leave us feeling angry, guilty, confused…or just empty. But they are natural, understandable reactions to the lasting and repeated trauma of supporting others through the worst moments of their lives. Here’s how to recognize their effects early and some things to do when they strike.

Staying hopeful is a real challenge with chronic illness — for those diagnosed and for their closest loved ones. In this episode, I invite you into a raw conversation about becoming hopeless and finding hope again in your own life. Hope is a precious resource for life with a chronic illness. It can become stretched too thin by our challenges, but we can renew and restore it with patience and support. Hope is a skill that can be learned and must be practiced.

Most of us aren’t very kind to ourselves, but we need to be. This episode dives into what it really means to be kind to yourself, as opposed to just occasionally “nice.” Along the way, we understand what self-esteem and self-compassion are doing in your life, how they can become challenged by the ongoing distress of life with chronic illness, and what we can do to improve self-esteem and (more important) bolster self-compassion.

We all need better sleep. Better sleep is a necessary key to a better life. But good sleep seems to be in short supply. In this episode we talk about why so many of us sleep so poorly, and we suggest the most important things research says we can do to insure the good night’s sleep we all crave.

We know we’re supposed to exercise. So why is it so hard? What should we do? Why should I care, especially when I already have a chronic health condition? How can we get started and keep going? We’ll answer these questions and more as we talk about how to get moving.

In this second episode on meditation, we discuss research supporting its benefits (and its limitations). Dr. Payne also introduces you to several kinds of meditation that can be useful for improving quality of life with chronic illness. And we discuss tools and communities that can help you with your journey.

There’s a lot about life with a chronic health condition that rightly gets us down. When we’re feeling bad, those around us often resort to advising that we need to “look on the bright side” — as if that were the actual problem. However, our mindset does have a huge impact on our quality of life. It’s not simply a matter of “choice,” but there are tactics that really can help us brighten our outlooks and improve our experiences, even under the most difficult circumstances.

Grief is not what we expect. It’s messy. It doesn’t follow a neat path. And it’s not always neatly resolved. Yet loss is a necessary part of living — and it’s something that a life touched by chronic illness must navigate. Here’s a better way to think about grief and some strategies for accommodating the real demands of loss.