Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

The Pressure of Trying to Get Well

29 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:27

In this short guided talk, Joanne Smith addresses listeners who feel stuck in a cycle of urgency, fear, and over‑thinking while trying to recover from illness or hardship. She reassures them that struggling does not preclude healing and invites them to relax through conscious breathing. Joanne uses vivid metaphors—a clenched fist that tires when held too long and a snow globe representing a busy, swirling mind—to illustrate how mental pressure builds and amplifies distress. By encouraging simple, mindful breaths and visualizing the release of tension, she aims to help the audience lower the volume of their inner chatter, reduce anxiety, and create space for recovery.

Chapters

Struggling doesn't mean that you can't still recover, okay? So just relax in knowing that, just take a few nice breaths. Breathing, the most beautiful, beautiful thing ever that we can do. So let's just dive in here really, and I'll just keep talking to this a little bit more, because if we're in that situation where We're trying so desperately to get well, but actually what's happening is we're living in a feeling of tension, pressure. A good way to describe it is like this fist, you know, squeezing like this. How long can you hold that before it starts to get tired? And how long can you hold this? Before it starts to get tired. How can— how long can you hold that? Just an example, but if you're living in this pressure, this urgency, this fear, this overthinking, think, think, think, you know, this busy mind— busy mind, I've got to get my snow globe for this one. Look at the snow, that's the busy mind. So if you're living like that and feeling really stuck, Well, what happens is everything gets even more, even more amplified, louder and louder and louder.