Welcome to the sixth day of the WEGO Health Advocating for Another Carnival Blog! And thank you for all your support and kind messages thus far.  Today’s prompt reads as follows:

Let someone else’s wise words inspire you.  Find a quote that moves you in some way then free write about i.  Don’t stop writing for 15-20 minutes.  Now post! 

 

The quote I have chosen for this prompt is:

 

I found this quote whilst browsing on Pinterest on a day where I was feeling particularly bad, lying in bed, bored and feeling utterly miserable due to the severity of my symptoms – than I found this and it just spoke to me almost immediately.

Anyone reading this who is also battling a chronic illness everyday knows how it can often get you really down mentally, as well as suffering physically.  It can be so easily to just give up, and just stay in bed, rolling up in a ball and giving up on life.  But although this seems like the best option, it isn’t going to solve anything.  Even though it can be very tough sometimes, we have little choice but to battle on and live the best life that we possibly can and to find our own happiness.  After all, studies within the field of positive psychology have shown that those patients who are happy and are positive in their outlook report less severity of symptoms and are often more physically well than those who are negative in their outlook.

And the quote also fits in nicely with the idea of a ‘gratitude diary’ that was suggested by a social worker who runs a local group which I attend weekly.  The idea of a gratitude diary is to write between 3 and 5 things (or more if you wish) that you were grateful for and what makes you appreciate life – it could be anything from speaking to a friend on the phone, or going out for coffee with a friend to simply grateful for still being alive!  It really is up to you!  The idea of the gratitude diary is to strengthen emotional resilience and reduce stress, as well as teaching the mind to find the positives in a situation instead of dwelling on the negatives.

I have written a gratitude diary for a few weeks now, and it really does work!  And it makes me more happy picking the positives of my day, and those activities that I have enjoyed and instead of dwelling on how bad I have felt because of my symptoms.

As I often experience tremors in my hands, I was recommended a great website in which after you sign-up you receive an email every night at the same time asking what you were grateful for.  And then you simply reply to the email and all of your responses are then saved onto the website, and whenever you feel sad or ‘down in the dumps’ you can log-in and read all of your entries.  And best of all it’s completely free and all of the responses can only be viewed by the account holder.  To find out more go to:

www.happyrambles.com 

Hoped you all enjoyed the post – and feel free to reply with any comments…