Emotional and Spiritual Optimization: A Critical Foundation for Overall Health

This is part 9 in my "Fatigue & Fibromyalgia Are Optional" series. In this week's Brain Fog Friendly (BFF) Summary, I'll discuss the importance of having a healthy mental outlook on life, and how critical this is to healing from any illness.

BFF Summary

1. Our minds have no idea what is authentic to us—who we are and what we really want. Our minds simply know what we were taught to do to get approval.
2. But our feelings are tied directly to our authenticity. If something feels good, it is generally what our soul and psyche really want. If something feels bad, it is not authentic to us and generally reflects a false belief that we have about something.
3. Let what feels good (not what you think feels good) be how you set your life's GPS. Once you program in the "address" that feels good, then your mind, like the GPS, is brilliant at getting you there.
4. A simple three-step program will get you there.
1. Fully feel whatever you are feeling. When it no longer feels good, then it's time to let the feeling go. It is not critical to understand why you feel that way. Simply feel the feelings.
2. Make life a no-fault system. As long as we are blaming somebody else, we are giving up our power to fix the problem. In addition, most of the time we are projecting our own self-blame onto others.
3. Choose to only keep your attention on things that feel good.
5. For those of you interested in exploring this further, I invite you to read my e-book Three Steps to Happiness: Healing Through Joy.
6. Learn to forgive yourself and others. I am happy to recommend an excellent book, The Magic Words: Your Pathway to Peace, Joy, and Happiness, by my friend Jon Lovgren.

In my forty-two years as a physician, I have learned something very important, something we were never taught in medical school. Part of healing from any illness sometimes includes a key piece of information. It is important to understand how an illness may actually help an individual. This seems an odd concept, but it really makes good sense once we look at it.

I have routinely found that if I help somebody get well just so they can go back to what made them sick in the first place, they will usually get a new illness. For example, their illness took them out of a very toxic job situation, then they got well while at home with their kids as they'd always wanted. Then when they reentered the workforce and found themselves back in a job they hated, their pain and symptoms returned.

Put simply, an important part of both recovering from illnesses and staying healthy is being authentic to yourself.

From My New Edition of From Fatigued to Fantastic

To remind you, BFFs are just the short summaries I include at the beginning of each chapter in my newest edition of From Fatigued to Fantastic I added these to my new edition to help readers who don't have the time to go through all the detail in every chapter, allowing them to quickly get the main points of a topic while devoting more time to reading the details in chapters they're more interested in.