We’ve all had the experience of a temporary illness. You’re healthy one day, but the next morning, you wake up with some kind of bug. You take some medicine, get some rest, and a couple days later, you’re back to normal. In a week, this episode is all but forgotten. It’s a health hiccup, a short-term setback.
But perhaps you’ve reached the age when your peers are always sharing about their latest maladies. On social media, you read about another former classmate dying suddenly from a heart attack. You discover that a friend or a neighbor is going in for a follow-up appointment after a suspicious mammogram. Then you realize it has been more than two years since you’ve seen your doctor. You make an appointment and show up for a wellness exam and—surprise! Your blood pressure and cholesterol are both a good bit higher than they should be. After your “wellness” visit, you don’t feel so well anymore.
As a result, you change your diet, start exercising, lose a few pounds, and once more feel in control of your destiny. Then comes your follow-up appointment. For some people, these changes will have made a significant difference. But you may not be one of these people. Despite all of your healthy changes and vigorous efforts, your blood pressure remains high. The doctor calls in another prescription for you to pick up on your way home.
A paradigm shift is occurring. You’ve enjoyed good health for most of your life. It has been one of the few areas in which you always felt “in control.” Suddenly, you realize that you aren’t. Despite all of your disciplined attempts to regain your health, you’re now a patient.
For some, this paradigm shift is traumatic, especially if they’ve lived under the illusion of being “in complete control” of their health—which truly is an illusion. Some people take responsible strides to improve their health, but others become fearful and obsessed. They fight feverishly to regain control and obsessively check their blood pressure daily and at every “free blood pressure check” opportunity.
Others feel guilty when they remember all of the friends with failing health they haven’t reached out to. They then worry, “Will everyone going to forget me in my illness the way I’ve ignored others?”
Still others take these changes in stride and decide to see the journey forward as “a part of growing older.” Maybe they decide it’s time to be a bit more responsible with their diet and exercise, but they don’t become unsettled or distraught. They accept the inevitability of aging. It’s this last group we should strive to join.
I want you to note that I didn’t write, “as part of growing old.” Each day we grow older, but regardless of age, we don’t have to have the mindset of old. Old implies not valued or no longer hopeful. Older, or sometimes I use the word “elder”, implies wise, experienced, and traveled.
The idea of old versus older may seem like a euphemism, however, in the context of how we see ourselves and experience our paradigm shifts of health, they matter. Healthy longevity begins with our thoughts and emotions. Surrendering to the need for lifestyle changes, medicine, or even just needing to watch your weight through diet and exercise is healthy.
Struggling against our thoughts and physical realities doesn’t change them, it just creates more stress. This is often described as perseverated thinking or circular thoughts. Studies reveal that this type of thought patterns lead to additional stress with associated adverse health outcomes through hormonal dysregulation.
Surrendering to life’s unavoidable paradigm shifts is not quitting. It’s accepting and managing one’s health within this construct. If you can’t surrender it all, surrender a little bit of it, even for a day at a time or a moment at a time.
Almost all of us will face this shift of feeling relatively healthy but needing some kind of medical treatment to maintain a certain level of health, such as lifestyle changes, health care visits, holistic care visits, therapy, and yes, sometimes prescriptions. Let that daily dose of awareness serve as a healthy dose of reality: We aren’t in full control of medical outcomes. All we can control is our attitude and our choices. We can choose the behaviors that make for a healthy lifestyle.
Dr. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, and later founded logotherapy, wrote about those who survived their circumstances. He stated, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”