***This content comes from the Joint Pain Programme Journal by Nuffield Health. As a Rehab Specialist running this program, I’m excited to share these helpful insights with you all.
The way you think about your body and how you manage your symptoms will have a huge impact on your rehabilitation journey, your future health, and goals.
Beliefs that grow your confidence in your ability to make healthy changes will boost your progress.
Mindset matters
Your attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs are key in shaping how you view different situations. They also determine how you will respond and react to those situations.
Your belief in your ability to take actions that will help you reach your desired goals or results is often called ‘self-efficacy’.
Self-efficacy is important for health as it helps us find a way of changing our health behaviors, even when this seems hard or impossible.
You can think of this as a belief in yourself and your abilities.
Overcoming obstacles
Think about how you approach challenges and setbacks. What do you tell yourself about the situation?
Do you have an inner voice that tells you to keep going and that you can do this, encouraging you to overcome obstacles and barriers bit by bit?
Or do you find yourself giving up before you have started, telling yourself it is impossible and that you can’t make healthy choices like eating a healthy diet or increasing your activity levels?
Do you become overcome by self-doubt, or do you persevere in the belief that there are positive achievements to be found beyond the challenges?
Easier said than done?
Everyone has goals for what they want to achieve in life, and you will also have goals about what you want to achieve in this program.
You may be thinking that this all sounds ‘easier said than done’. The good news is that you can learn how to improve your self-belief, which in turn can help build your motivation.
Self-belief
Self-belief matters more than you think. Your ability to accomplish your goals is strongly linked to your self-belief.
By working on your self-belief, you can start to view obstacles as opportunities to learn and grow rather than things to be avoided.
Self-belief can also help you develop new skills, like learning how to persevere with a project or adjust to life changes.
Developing belief in yourself
You may think that self-belief is something that you either have or you don’t. Like any skill, however, you can learn how to develop your self-belief and give yourself a pathway to achieving your future goals.
Success starts with one step at a time
Achieving any goal starts with small steps. Every one of these is an accomplishment, no matter how small.
Success starts with the belief that ‘I can’ followed by one small step in that direction. Where tasks seem difficult, tell yourself that with practice, one step at a time, you can master it.
Do each small step to the best of your ability.
Learning by observation
Watching how other people accomplish goals can help you to learn and can also motivate you.
Tell yourself, ‘If they can go from where they were to here, then so can I.’
Observing someone else’s effort to succeed can help us to grow our own self-belief.
Find your ‘cheerleaders’
Surround yourself with people who believe in your ability to succeed.
Ask your friends and family to become your coaches and cheerleaders, celebrating each small victory along the way.
Turn your hopes into visions
Turning your hopes into reality can seem daunting. Often that is because the destination seems impossible, either too far away or too difficult to achieve.
Setting clear, achievable goals can help you develop a realistic action plan—a gradual pathway for achieving your hopes and dreams, one small step at a time.
Your Space to Reflect
📍 Starting Point
- How do your thoughts typically affect your pain levels?
- When do you notice stress having the biggest impact on your symptoms?
🤔 Looking Deeper
- What patterns have you noticed between your thoughts and physical symptoms?
- How does your pain change when you're feeling positive versus worried?
💡 Exploring Possibilities
- What helps break the cycle when pain and stress feed each other?
- Which relaxation techniques work best for you?
🔄 New Perspectives
- How might viewing stress management as important as physical treatment change things?
- What would being kinder to yourself during flare-ups look like?
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