Case Study: Three Decisions
Three Decisions
When you listen to patient stories, you often find uncertainty as a driver of someone’s stress.
Uncertainty means that wherever they focus on that situation, they find it difficult to resolve. Placing your focus on anything results in you attempting to bring meaning to it so that you understand it and feel comfortable with it.
If you choose uncertainty, that’s a different matter because there is a thrill or a challenge when you don’t quite know what will happen. You are preparing yourself to see if you can overcome whatever may appear because of that uncertainty.
Exciting Things
These are the exciting things in life that get our adrenaline pumping. Now we know that you can do this for a while, and then we need to rest.
When it’s a situation not of our choosing which triggers the uncertainty, it is framed emotionally as something more unpleasant. Something to resolve because the stressful feelings which come from that focus are communicated as undesirable.
When we make decisions in the face of uncertainty, we change the dynamic of it.
Once we have chosen to do something, whether it is later viewed as right or wrong, we remove the uncertainty creating the stress we want to resolve.
Three Patients
Three patients highlighted this mechanism as they described the influence of decision on their persistent back pain.
They started to understand the link between the stress response and pain. And that this can be from the past, present or future, and dealing with anything currently stressful is a significant factor in changing how someone feels. The past is the past, and the future hasn’t yet happened, so you might as well deal with what is relevant now.
Each of these patients felt they had a decision to may to resolve their uncertainty.
Spoilt Leisure Time
The first was someone whose relaxation and downtime from a busy week was the weekend’s football involving watching and spending time with his son.
This has been gradually eroded as he took over responsibility for the team and felt the pressure, along with dealing with anxious parents and teenage boys who answered back.
This got to the point where rather than going somewhere to reduce stress, he felt he was again going into battle after doing that at work all week.
Overloaded At Work
The second was related to someone overloaded at work.
The jobs kept coming in, with the time to complete them diminishing. The travelling increased and the benefits that came with the job reduced.
After several months of this and the working week merging into the weekend, the sense of overwhelm was too much.
Relationship Pain
And finally, the third was a relationship which, to many outside looking in, seemed great.
Enough money, a lovely house, a picture-postcard possibility of a potential family, but the person wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t going to end in tears.
There isn’t a certainty in anything, but if there is substantial uncertainty in a relationship situation, nothing material will cover that up in the long term, and this person felt that way.
All Three Made A Decision
All three decided something.
One left the football team, one left work and started his own company, and the third left their partner.
All might appear drastic from someone else viewpoint but
From each person, subjective viewpoint wit was the right thing to do.
Their low back pain stopped soon after making the decision and carrying it out.
That doesn’t mean that their uncertainty ends in their lives, but seeing a change in their pains highlighted to them what the situations they were facing were doing to them.
Sense of Relief
The sense of relief and empowerment that comes with decision making is liberating. It does not have to be profound as the decisions that I’m describing are here.
Each could change their pain without leaving each situation by changing how they feel about those situations, but whatever is right for each individual is right for them.
If you can’t change a situation or change the way you feel about a problem, then give it your all whilst you’re in it, and maybe some more time trying to work it out when you’re not in it.
But at some point, you have to decide to set some time aside for rest from that in the smallest way possible.
Decide On Something
Some different thoughts, a different breathing pattern, some calmer soothing movements and some emotional expression or framing of what you do which represent kindness to yourself.
Setting boundaries and creating a little space to all some opportunity to recover or come down from whatever it is that is creating your uncertainty.
Whatever you decide to do, make a decision. You’ll feel so much better for it.
What’s next?
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