3 Ways Chronic Illness Remaps Your Brain

You're listening to the She's Crafted to Thrive podcast, and this is your host Nikita Williams. On this show, we're talking about what it's like to start, grow, and scale a business while living with chronic illness. You will hear from other creatives and CEOs as they share their stories and the lessons that led them to learn to lean more into what works for them. You'll discover that success does not mean perfection, and fear, negative thoughts, and challenges are all a part of the journey, but there's always an abundance of wins. So stay tuned and you'll find the inspiration and tools you need to craft a life and business that thrives. Hey there, beautiful! I've got something for you. If you want to feel more ease and joy in your business without sacrificing your health, energy, and creativity, but you feel like you've got to, you know, pay your dues first, or you're feeling sort of lost in your business, then you want to check out my mini course, 5 Days to Getting Crystal Clear in Your Creative Business. Created this course to help you remove the frustration that's blocking you from receiving exactly what you want and go from stuck to creating the business that you want with ease and joy. So visit thrivewithnikita.com/minicourse and use the code THRIVE to get it free. Again, that's thrivewithnikita.com/minicourse and use the code THRIVE to get it free. That's my special gift to my podcast tribe. So go off and thrive. All right, let's hop on into this new episode. I am so excited that you're here for this series of how to grow your creative service-based business if you are living with a chronic illness. So this series is all about like the mind and our way of thinking and how it actually can either hinder us or help move us to do what it is that we need to do in our businesses. And it also helps us to heal. I feel like some of the things as chronic illness warriors that we need to heal in order to embrace a full, fulfilling business, a fulfilling life, and be happier. These are things that I'm sharing with you that have come from my own personal experience. My own experiences as well as those that I have worked to coach with. I want to start this particular episode off by saying that I am not a doctor. I do not know your particular circumstances inside and out. So when you hear these— this information about how our mind is remapped around pain, I want you to know that it's just from deep research, from clinical research, as well as my own personal experience and also seeing it reflected in my clients. These are observations. These are not set in stone, but I have come to really appreciate just putting this out there as awareness for us who are living with chronic illness and building a business. So this episode is something that I've added really, really at the core of what I do and why I do it. And I became more aware of this when I started to incorporate essential oils in my own journey, um, and starting to see that pain and how I feel and think have so much to do with each other. When I first started working with my coach, um, we were working on the physical side of things, um, and as I have progressed and started to see how much the physical has so much changed the way I think and feel and do things and perceive things, I have come to really appreciate the power of the mind and the body connection. There really is a link. That's a scientific fact. There's even a book called The Body Takes the Blow. There are scientific research all about how the mind and body responds to pain and trauma, and there's a whole, whole lot of that. Um, but I'm going to talk to you from a standpoint of seeing how it has been reflected with a little bit of geekiness, like a little bit of science-y-ness for you. Um, but most importantly, what I want you to walk away from in this episode is that really, truly, and honestly, to be successful in business in general, we have to really stop looking at the tangibles of like marketing and website building and email marketing and saying like, the reason all this is not working is because I haven't figured out the perfect fix, right? And really transform or reframe that. It really actually is from an inward-out place. I truly believe, and I have seen, that in order to become more authentically aligned and growing a very successful whatever it is in this case business, we must become honestly aware of our thoughts, patterns, beliefs, behaviors, so that we can cultivate the ability to observe, question, lean in, and let go. A creative mindset is learning to lean into the fear and still take chances, as well as knowing that it's time to shift gears and try something new. And so this becomes really apparent when we understand how the brain works. So this is the geeky part. You can pass for this, but I think this is crucial because it's a thing that we don't know. Like, we didn't— I know for me, I didn't know. I didn't realize how powerful the mind and the brain is and how so much we are created in such a beautiful way to— in such a beautiful way that that mind-body connection is like serious. There have been multiple research, um, cases that are talking about— and I will probably put a link to one of the ones that I definitely was like, whoa, it's very scientific. I only really started understanding scientific research when I went— started going to school for my essential oil professional, um, certification, um, to become an aromatherapist, which has fully informed me back into more of a clinical way of thinking about the mind and body, but also from an emotional mindset point. But anyway, there is a research that specifically that I'm thinking about as I record this episode that talks about how pain is something that our brain has learned to become more hypersensitive to pain signals, and not just physical pain, you guys. But emotional and mental pain. So as much as our body experiences physical pain, our emotions and our, like, our way of thinking can also produce a hypersensitized experience with pain, right? So the brain can learn to be hypersensitive to pain signals. So let me say that again. The brain can be able to learn to be hypersensitive to pain signals. And that's not just in our body, like physical body, even though we do feel pain usually physically. Like, we're like, oh, I have a headache, your head hurts, oh, I'm cramping, I have a flare-up, I'm, I'm bloated. Our body actually usually presents the pain, but sometimes that pain is from an emotional belief, thought, place, and patterns and things like that in our head. So how does this reflect in our businesses? Well, you guys, if we are building a business where it's heightening or triggering the pain signals in our, in our brain, those pain pathways that are being created from physical pain, and now we're adding a mental emotional signal pathway, because our brain works in a way where it's creating consistent links, like links that it's making, um, it's making decisions based on what we think, feel, see, um, taste, and smell, like all of our 5 senses, is making a connection to all of those things and creating pathways in, in our brains that are super easy. Our brain is really lazy, believe it or not. As powerful as it is, our brain is kind of lazy. It likes to do what it feels comfortable doing. It likes to just make assumptions that they've gathered all this information and just go and do that. That's like our imperfect brain, how it likes to do. It's easy, we can just do that. And so one of the things that we don't really think about when we're running businesses is that sometimes we can become, um, what I call in a loop of working in pain. Not just physical pain, you guys, but doing the same actions and thinking the same way about something in our business that has been a loop, that has been encouraged by pain signals. We almost become desensitized in a way. I know that's like how you can become hypersensitive and desensitized at the same time. It's the same way if you think about it in like a forest. When you're first trekking through a forest. At first, if you're trekking through a forest and nobody's ever made a trail, it is going to take a lot of work. It's going to take multiple times of going through that same, same direction, same trail to create and forge a pattern, like a beautiful beaten path in that forest. It's kind of like when we first get our diagnosis with like some kind of chronic pain. I know for myself, when I first was dealing with all the pain when I didn't know what it was and my body didn't know what it was. So it was so loud. It's very, very loud. My pain levels then, I used to say like I have a high tolerance for pain back in the day. I have a less tolerance for pain in some way, shape or form, or I have just become so desensitized from it. Right. I've just become so accustomed to it. And that's what our brain does. It just gets so used to doing— going down that same pathway of like, this is pain. This is pain, and we become really adaptable. We're very adaptable people when it comes to pain, but that doesn't always mean that it's serving us well. It's actually creating this thing where we don't even see it, we don't even acknowledge it. It's kind of just there, and until we start questioning our own actions, our own thoughts, and our own beliefs, do we recognize, hey, wait a minute, I'm in pain. I'm in pain from this emotional stress. I'm in pain from like the way I'm thinking about this. Our body at times too likes to tell us when we're in more pain that when we have been ignoring it, right? So a lot of research has said that chronic pain and chronic illness really comes from an overload of stress triggers, right? Things that are really adding to the inflammation, which stress is triggered and creates that fear flight. Chemical signal in our body that raises our inflammation rates. And so that has a lot to do with our minds and our bodies and our business. And so if we think about it, for example, when we've all experienced like a flare-up and possibly like we, we, whatever the flare-up is. So for me, it's usually with endo or right now I last year, or this year, whatever year we're in, 2021 while I'm recording this, I was diagnosed— no, it was 2020. Goodness, time is flying. 2020, I was diagnosed with intercystitis. I'm saying that wrong, but it's IC, which is another name called for chronic bladder pain. Now, I live with fibromyalgia, endometriosis, and some other inflammatory tummy issues. And all of those things, I figured in my head that I've kind of gotten to knowing how to live with them more effectively. I know how to soothe those pains. I know how to know what's going on with my body. But this IC pain is brand new. So it, it, when it's a flare-up, it rears its ugly head and it's telling me, you're in pain, honey chile. And this is very, very very uncomfortable. It's screaming, right? Now let's say 2 or 3 years from now, I don't believe, based on my experience with my other pains, that it's always going to be that way, right? I might have a flare-up, I know it's there, um, but there's only a few times in between do I feel like really intense flare-ups, really intense flare-ups like we need to go to the hospital. Ever since I started incorporating stress um, destressors, um, really being more focused on what I'm thinking because those things can help, can and have triggered some flare-ups in the past. Once I started doing more of the mindset work, I noticed how much my body responded when I would release, when I would let things go, when I would like actually articulate what I'm feeling or thinking versus holding it in. And so besides that and using essential oils and EFT tea and journaling and lots of prayer and all of the beautiful things, I have a really great routine for my body when it has a flare-up. My body that has a flare-up. The correlation I'm trying to make here is that we don't have those things in our business. Why don't we? Why don't we have something in our business that when we're having ebbs and flows, um, and there's a lot more ebbs than flows, right? It's You know, for some of us it's up and down consistently. Sometimes we are consistent and we're continuing to grow and scale and there's different pressures and fears that are there. And we are just going, we're in that hustle culture, that hustle mindset, let's just keep going, just keep going, just doing. And it's not on purpose. It's just how the society and how we've kind of learned to, you know, get through it. And our body at some point says, hello, no more. We all have had that moment where our body's like, uh-uh, stop. You need to rest. You've got to do it. Or you're like, you might have a health scare, a really big one. That is your body triggering you to pay attention to what it needs. But it was spurred by the things we were experiencing in our lives, you guys, in our lives. So when we're running a business, we really need to connect with how can I de-stress my business? How can I focus on bringing more awareness to why I'm doing something? And how can I bring my creativity to the fore where it's being used at in the most authentic, aligned, fulfilled way? And just like we have our tools for when we have a flare-up, we need to have those same tools for our businesses. You know, our, our mind is so, you know, mapped, if you will, from chronic illness of being able to push through. This is something we talk about all the time. We're always pushing through the pain. And I have learned even in my own physical journey, pushing through the pain is for the birds. Yes, you heard me right. Pushing through the pain. Do I believe so? Let me give this caveat. Do I believe there are times that we do need to push through the pain? Yes. But the problem I find is that we're doing it all the time, all the time, versus really analyzing what's going on. Do I need to rest? Do I need to drink water? Do I need to take this supplement? Do I need to do what I need to do to come back to a more calm less stress place and give my body time to heal. I think that's where we get in trouble is when we're always pushing through. And I think that's also where we get really in trouble when we're in our businesses. We're pushing through, we're just doing the things, we're just getting into, you know, the, the hustle and flow of like, let's just figure it out. Let's just test this out. Let's just keep doing this. And even though, man, that hurt my feelings, even though, man, I feel like I've been staying up and burning the candle at all ends, even though Um, I feel like I'm comparing myself to Sally Sue and Sally Jane and Jane John and whatever, her and he and whatever. All of those things are happening in our mind and we're just pushing through, but it's not dealing with it. It's not letting it go. It's not releasing it. It's not like saying it out loud. How do you feel? Journaling about it, releasing it to someone else, a therapist, a coach, wherever, letting that negative Nelly stuff get out of your head. And for my clients, I use tools like EFT, aromatapping, journaling to help them to have those tools so that they can free up space to truly be creative, to truly do the business that feels really good to them, that gives them more power to, you know, really tap into doing what they love from a place that feels good, that's not from pain. That's from ahas, that's from realization, that's from letting go of this baggage that doesn't need to be sitting on your shoulders. When you can have more awareness about what and how your brain works, it can really help your business, you guys. So I challenge you to take some time to think about, am I carrying pain in my business? Are there offers and services and products Are there Facebook groups, communities that I'm a part of that I always feel feeling yucky and drained? The same thing with your client work. Are there things that you're like, oh my gosh, this is, you know, this is paying the bills, but it takes every piece of, like, every spoon I have to get through doing that thing today, every piece of energy to do that thing. You know, there's some, there is an account on, that I have read recently, a spiritual one. Um, and this person was sharing that they had to leave their job because it was taking away from their spiritual energy, right? It was taking away from them giving their full amount of energy to the place that they felt was the most important in their life. So whatever that is for you, for me, it's definitely spiritual. Secondly, it's my, myself, my family, and my friends. I want to be in the place where I can be the best for me and for serving the God that I serve and taking care of my clients from a place of abundance, not from a place of pain. And even though we will have pain, it's different when you're dealing with the pain, you're aware of the pain, versus pushing through the pain. There's a difference. There is such a difference. Pushing through the pain is usually not acknowledging, releasing, and letting go. It's just not— it's just going, usually. But to have pain and be aware of it and start acknowledging it and figuring out how you can shed some of that pain in your business, how you can shed some of that pain in your mental thinking, can shift the way your life and your business runs. So most of my clients come to me thinking, hey, Nikita Williams, we're gonna do this thing and we're gonna learn this strategy. And yes, we do all of those things, but first we shed the pain in our businesses, and we also try to shed the pain behind the shame that we might be feeling for living with chronic illness. There's so much with that. So I hope this is a little bit helpful to help you see that you're not alone. Like, if you feel like, I've been trying all of the things, I've been doing all of the things that people say, I'm trying all of the strategies and all of the things, and I still am coming up short, still coming up short, still feeling frustrated, still having tons of more flare-ups than I want to have. It could be that there's pain seeping out and you've become so almost numb to it that it just feels like, I just need to keep going, I just need to push through. I want you to challenge that thought. I want you to challenge that belief, because how is that serving you to get to where you want to go? How is that serving you to show up as your best self for the people and things that matter to you in your life. How is it? All right, y'all, I'm going to stop with that. I hope you enjoyed this episode about chronic illness, how it remaps the brain, and how that's affecting your results in business. If that wasn't clear, let me know. There's so much about this topic, about the link between the body and the mind, and I like to preface it in this context of conversation of how it affects how we show up and what we attract in our businesses. Um, and why it might feel really hard for us in our businesses because we're pushing through quote unquote pain. All right, y'all, that's a wrap. Thank you for listening. And I hope this conversation inspired you. Be sure to visit craftedtothrive.com to check out our show notes, connect with our guests, and grab some of those goodies. Join us for the next episode. And in the meantime, remember, yes, yes, yes, you are crafted to thrive.