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2 Things You Must Do to Treat and Cure Fibromyalgia

June 15, 2010 by Lisa

The First thing you must do to Treat and Cure Fibromyalgia is: Get Happy

Get happy? This may seem like a weird thing you must do, right? And what does getting happy have to do with treating and curing fibromyalgia anyway?

Everything.

Let me explain why, in my experience, getting happy, or working to get as happy as I possibly could, was the single most important thing I did to get better from fibromyalgia.

Essentially, in my opinion, fibromyalgia is caused and perpetuated by chronic tightening and shortening of the fascia. Fascia is a connective tissue that covers every muscle, muscle fiber, nerve, and organ in the body.

This chronic tightening and shortening is caused by many things, but chief among them may be stress chemicals.

When you are stressed, your body releases stress chemicals. When your body releases stress chemicals and it can’t clear them all out right away, it stores them in your tissues and your fascia.

When your fascia is crammed full of stress chemicals, every inch of it is really painful, your bodily processes don’t work right, and you are always tired (because your body is always trying to clear out the stress chemicals instead of resting or digesting or doing it’s other things).

So, if you get happy, immediately you will stop laying down more stress chemicals. This is really important. If you can stop laying down more stress chemicals your body will start winning the battle it’s been waging to clear more stress chemicals than it is storing evey day.

Another perk of getting happy is the opposite of stress chemical release: helpful chemical release.

Stress chemicals are a biochemical response within your body that occur when you are feeling negative emotions like anger, fear, despair, worry, anxiety, and depression. The negative emotions don’t cause the response, they just indicate it.

There are biochemical responses that occur when you are feeling joy, love, happiness, enthusiasm, and interest also. These good chemicals, help heal the body.

So, when you get happy, you are both stopping the laying down of harmful stress chemicals and starting the circulating of helpful, feel-good chemicals. Any time period that you can sustain great happiness in will be a healing time for your body.

What do I mean by get happy?

I believe that happiness is under my control. I used to believe that circumstances and events around me determined whether I was happy or not. Because I believed that, it was true, and I was often not happy.
Now that I have made a commitment to being happy, and looked for things that make me happy, and TRY each day to think thoughts and pay attention to things that will give me that *feeling* of happiness, I am happy a lot more.

I’ve had to let go of a lot of my old thoughts and beliefs about things that made me unhappy too. This is a pretty complicated subject, and one that I am still working my way through, so I will just advise you to check out the work of other people. Here’s my favorite book on learning how to get happy via your thoughts.

The Second thing you must do to Treat and Cure Fibromyalgia is: Bodywork

If you could get perfectly happy and stay happy you probably wouldn’t need bodywork. Your body could clear itself out completely and totally heal itself eventually. I completely believe this, based on my own experience.

However, it took me a long time to learn how to truly get and be happy, and it may take you a long time too.

While you are learning, it’s really nice to have something physical to do that can show you very concrete results within in fairly short time.

For me, also I am extremely appreciative that I took the opportunity to learn the language of my body and figure out how to help my fascia.

This means that anytime I have an ache or a pain, I can just feel it and know what’s causing it and what will help it the most. This also means that any time I get hurt, I have a better inner knowledge of how hurt I really am.

For example, I recently fell while crossing a rope bridge and I badly wrenched my wrist when I caught my full body weight with just that one hand. After the initial pain subsided I was able to ‘listen’ to the sensations within my wrist and know where the injury was and how to help it. (it needed complete rest for a couple of hours and a little bit of self-massage in a specific place). The wrist was 95% better within one day and completely better within 2 weeks.

This is the kind of knowledge that anyone who takes the time to learn self-bodywork to reverse fibromyalgia will develop. This is what I want for you. It’s like having an owner’s manual or instruction booklet to your own body.

What do I mean by bodywork?

There are two main types of bodywork that I do: Stretching, and Self-Massage

Both are completely effective and both complement each other.

In my opinion, there are 1000 things that you could do that would help heal your fibromyalgia, like stretching, yoga, pilates, self trigger point massage, deep tissue massage, shiatsu, watsu, bowen work, rolfing, biofeedback, progressive relaxation, needle therapy or many more.

I have tried dozens of things, and the two that have stuck with over the years are restorative yoga and self trigger-point massage. These two give me the most ‘bang for my buck’. They help me the most and are the easiest to do and stick with.

I like stretching for daily, full-body maintenance of my wonderfully loose and good-feeling fascia, and I like trigger point massage for spot-treatment. Say I am having pain, I can figure out where the pain is coming from and treat that area with self-trigger point massage, and within minutes I can reduce or eliminate that pain.

Just as a note here, when I first started healing, I did a lot of trigger point massage every day and I still had a lot of pain. My muscles had to be mostly healthy before just one session of self-massage would make them feel good – so don’t get discouraged if you don’t have immediate results right away.

So that’s it, those are the two things I have found that you absolutely must do if you want to get treat and cure fibromyalgia – there are many ways to do these two things. Just get started with ANYTHING and see where it takes you.

I like to recommend my book because I discuss many different tools and ways to do these two things, but never stray from them. These are my focus: Get Happy, and Bodywork.