How to recognize progress when healing feels slower than you hoped.
Recently I was thinking about how easy it is to miss our progress on a healing journey, to minimize it or even dismiss it completely as if it isn’t important.
I’ve gone through many phases of healing on my journey. The first phase was simply trying to find more than 2 hours a day that my brain actually worked, and to reduce the time I spent sleeping at the same time. And then, I was trying to reduce pain so that by the time I was awake, I could enjoy it! And if that’s where you are, that’s fine. If you’re living with chronic illness, fatigue, or long-term pain, this blog still applies to you.
I know that in the beginning, I tried to track progress daily. That didn’t work. Mostly because weeks and months and years have rhythms. I mean, if I drank coffee late in the day, I wouldn’t sleep, I’d wake up late, and I’d have a horrible time thinking clearly.
But on days that I did everything right, even then, progress wasn’t linear. It was 2 steps forward and one step back. Or sometimes 2 steps back. And a month or two into that pathway, I realized that progress was best measured over time.
And here I am, years later, relearning that whole concept.
I came back from a trip to the Mediterranean, and a full week later, I was working on Deckening (Gardening on my deck… I mean, that needs a special name when there are over 40 pots!). I couldn’t do that alone. Although, the last two years I had.
And then after I was done, OH MY WORD, was I stiff and sore. And it took me a few days to figure out that I wasn’t in a flare. I had simply done all the work I normally do in 4 weeks, in about 10 days.
Well, NO WONDER I WAS SORE!
Maybe a better way to track progress would involve a little realism! Maybe what I needed to do is to check out how I was doing 6 months or even a year ago! Actually last year, I was still sore, and often had to stop for a day or two between pots!
One of the interesting things is that I started a new supplement in February.
Deep sleep is when the body gets a chance to do some of the repair work it simply can’t do when we are awake.
Your body repairs at that time… and the issue is… a few years ago, I was sleeping, but not deeply! If Rob got up, I often heard him. I’d wake up to go to the bathroom and I didn’t really NEED to go (I know that, because my bladder wasn’t actually that full!). So while I slept 8 or more hours, I was waking occasionally.
But this spring, I started Restored… and now I rarely wake up.
And the difference is that because the body heals in deep sleep, my muscles could give me another day on the deck… and another and another.
My point is… we often need to stop the panic train… and have a better way to compare what may or may not be a flare! Realistically, I was doing quite a bit more than 6 months ago, and WAY more than last year.
Looking back, I realized I wasn’t going backwards at all. I was simply recovering from doing far more than I used to be able to do.
When I stopped comparing myself to last Tuesday and started comparing myself to last year, the picture looked very different.
The soreness was real. The fatigue was real. But so was the progress.
And sometimes that’s exactly what we need to remember when we’re somewhere in the middle of the healing journey.
It’s easy to focus on the things that still aren’t working. It’s easy to focus on the symptoms that haven’t changed, the limitations that are still there, or the goals we haven’t reached yet. I think most of us do that from time to time. But when we only look at what still needs to improve, we can completely miss the progress that has already happened.
Maybe that’s why it helps to look back once in a while. Not to live in the past, but simply to remind ourselves where we started. A year ago, I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now. Five years ago, I certainly wasn’t. And while there is still plenty of room for improvement, I can also see that things have changed.
So if you’re feeling discouraged today, maybe take a few minutes and look back. Not at last week. Not even at last month. Look back a year. Look back two years. Ask yourself what you can do now that you couldn’t do then. The answer might surprise you.
This year, one of the things that has supported my recovery has been improving the quality of my sleep. I’ll put a link below to the supplement I’ve been using if you’d like to learn more about it. It’s one of several tools I’ve added over time, and it has become a helpful part of my routine.
And if you’re somewhere in the middle of your own healing journey, I hope this encourages you.
You may not be where you want to be yet.
But don’t forget to look at how far you’ve already come.