Rehab, mind, body, or otherwise - 4 points toward regaining health, wellness, or peace of mind
“Rehab” brings about thoughts of physical therapy for an injury. But rehab principles can be applied to troubles with the mind as well as the body.
Rehab - The action of restoring someone to health or normal life.
Often when things are affecting our health, be it physical or mental, like our peace of mind, or stress levels, there are patterns that have added to or exacerbated the situation, moving us away from what should be healthy or normal. We are malleable, adaptable creatures, which means we can make changes for the better. Recognise the things for what they are in order to create a plan. Identifying the patterns and adjusting or creating new ones is the way of rehab.
In movement, patterns can reinforce things, for good or bad. Lift with your legs, keeping a tight core, and you’ve created a pattern of good movement which will reinforce the act of lifting. Bend at the waist, knees lock, and you create a bad movement pattern which reinforces pain and problems in muscles and joints and in movement and an aversion to movement and exercise. In our minds, what we say matters, what we think matters, the way we refer to things matters, words have meaning and they matter. It’s creating patterns.
Stabilization - In terms of the physical we identify the area and immobilize and compress. For the mind we have to look at the basic foundations of what makes mind or body function in a healthy way:
Hydration
Sleep (dark room, cooler temp, no phone, let things be until tomorrow-havamal),
Exercise (exert yourself; move - in the case of physical rehab, moving the uninjured parts to keep fit and help the body heal)
Nutrition (eat 3 small meals a day)
Exposure to the outdoors and the sun.
Interruption - This deals mostly with the mind and the negative thoughts that can creep in, either from stress or depression or existential dread, or from being “down” from a physical injury, which often causes the mind to drift to the negative. Do something else. Complete a task.
Don’t talk about the negative - self talk, or otherwise. Don’t give word power to the negative thing. This doesn’t mean pretending everything is sunshine and rainbows, but we can often continue to bring up a bad thing, which gives it largess and allows it to preoccupy space that could otherwise be filled with something more positive and helpful.Elimination - Stop doing the bad thing. On the physical side, this seems easy: if your knee is messed up, mayhap don’t keep doing squats or lunges. For the mind this is about not engaging in things that fuel the trouble. Watching the news often is an exercise in combating negativity from entering the mind, given everything that's going on these days. So don’t watch it. Put the phone down and read a book. Don’t give the mind fuel that damages the engine. Look for positive things instead. Again it’s not sunshine and rainbows, what is positive are things with structure, that support structure and good narratives. Things that help you create. Structure is positive, predictable behavior and will calm stress levels and not cause them to spike.
Restoration - Clean, Fix, Build, Create. Completion beats scale. We don’t need epic quests to feel better and set up momentum. What matters is completing things. Coming off a physical injury? Start slow. In our knee example above, start with walks. Then body weight squats or lunges. Small victories will propel us further. On the mind side the small victories will begin a positive narrative that I am someone who gets things done and moves forward. And it’ll be backed up by a nice little dopamine kick.
Contributed by Sensei James Smith, LMT