Today is day twelve of the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge! Trying to find the time to post every day has been a challenge but I’m managing to use my time in the midnight hours wisely when I can’t sleep. Today’s question in the month long challenge asks when you’re having a bad day, or a long week – how do you relax, recharge, and reset yourself?

With CRPS the easiest way to try and recharge or relax is to do something that calms the nerves. There are various ways that I find ways to reset myself depending on how bad the flare up is! With CRPS being a disease that affects your nervous system I put specific tools to work to try and calm things down. The first is doing relaxation therapy. This is breathing excercises that are specifically designed to calm the nervous system. If I’m having a really bad week then I do these every night so that I get an upper hand on the flare up that’s causing my nervous system to get so wound up! It often helps to unwind things so that my body isn’t as tense.

If you ask a CRPS patient how they try to deal with getting their body to relax often the answer is a simple spending time alone! With so many different triggers that set off this illness sometimes the best way to deal with things and reboot your brain so to speak is just to isolate yourself away from everyone around you. Just spending some time away from everyone around you on your own does the most good. That’s why my photography is such a great distraction from the pain. It allows me to go out and just get lost in my passion and it resets not only my body but my mind as well.

Things that have any type of calming affect like music are also methods that I deploy in order to get my brain to reset itself and calm the rest of my nervous system down. If I’m having a really bad week with pain along with all my other symptoms then I’ll listen to music once again to bring about that calming affect that my body needs. There isn’t really a complex recipe I use in order to get things to reset. Truth be told its a very simple recipe, and all I need to do is make sure that I’m putting all the pieces into use to get the results I need.

I guess the other thing I do is try to listen to my body! Now the word “try” is key here because its never easy to do! Often I’ll hear what my body has to say but sometimes I decide to ignore what its saying and my body goes through a real struggle trying to reset itself. With CRPS there is no easy answer and doing just one thing to get your body to recharge or relax often doesn’t work. Its usually doing a combination of things that is more successful. For me its been about learning a new lifestyle so that I can help my body do the things that my brain doesn’t allow it to do anymore!