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Episode 09: The Fine Art of Self-Care

The Fine Art of Self-Care

The One Thing that Makes the Biggest Difference in How You Feel with Fibromyalgia

If you put a gun to my head and said, “Tell me the one thing that turned your life around with fibromyalgia, and you can only choose one.” That one thing would be learning the fine art of self-care, learning how to listen to my body and give her what she needs so she can heal. This is the #1 thing that will make the biggest difference in how you feel. It is also the hardest part of the job. Taking care of yourself when you don’t feel good or when you’re frustrated with your body can be so, so challenging.

Key Points

  • Self-care means self-love, but it goes beyond an emotion we feel. Self-care means treating ourselves the way we would treat someone that we care about and treating ourselves the way we would treat someone who we are responsible for taking care of.
  • A caring environment is always healthier than a bullying environment, which is actually what most of us are providing ourselves when we try to make ourselves feel better. You just can’t heal if you are always berating yourself or pushing yourself to your breaking point.
  • We are teaching others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves.
  • We are also teaching others how they should take care of themselves by how we take care of ourselves.
  • Saying NO, and practicing good self-care, is what allows you to spend your energy, brain power, and good days on the things that are most important to you.

Links & Resources

Research Studies

Play Video

Transcript

You’re listening to the Fibromyalgia Podcast, Episode 9.

Welcome to the Fibromyalgia Podcast!

I’m your Coach, Tami Stackelhouse. Today we are talking about my favorite subject. We are going to be talking about the things you can do to feel better in your own body. We are talking about self-care. In Episode 2, I talked a lot about this. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that episode, it’s all about how your body isn’t actually the enemy. We talked a lot about the relationship we have with our bodies. We talk about the way we are abusing our bodies, both with what we do and what we say in our own heads, that other people might not even be hearing.

[01:39]  Today I want to talk a little bit more in-depth for what I mean when I say “Self-Care” and the ways that self-care is impacting your life and the people around you.

[01:52]  Just to recap, for those of you who haven’t listened to Episode 2, this really came home to me not too long after I got married. I did like many of us girls do—I was putting myself down and I was putting down my body, and my husband just stopped me in my tracks. He said, “You are beautiful. I love you, and every time you say stuff like that, you’re actually putting me down, because I chose you”.

[02:21]  Wow! That really stopped me in my tracks. I started, at that point, to begin to see myself the way somebody who loves me sees me. And yes, you guys, I know—I get messages like this all the time—I know how lucky I am! But, I want you to start treating yourselves that way.

[02:44]  So, just to define the terms… “Self-care” — “Self” meaning, of course, ourselves. You, meaning you. And “care”, which means a couple of different things. Care means love. Like to say, “I care for you; I love you”. Care can mean an emotion. Care also means taking care of something. Like you might care for your clothes. You don’t necessarily feel an emotion towards them. You’re actually doing things to help maintain them, help them be at their best.

[03:28]  That’s all self-care actually is. It is you loving yourself, and you doing the tasks that need to be done to take care of yourself, to tend to yourself, your body’s needs. So, for a super simple way of saying it, I’m saying that self-care means self-love. Not just in the emotion we feel but treating ourselves the way we would treat someone that we care about, and treating ourselves the way we would treat someone who we are responsible for taking care of.

[04:11]  If you have a child, if you have a friend, someone you need to take care of… if you have a pet. For many people, if you’ve not had a good family background, adopting a pet is a great way of learning this lesson because you have to take care of them. They are dependent upon you. You’ve got to feed them. You’ve got to take them to the doctor. I’ve always had cats. You’ve got to make sure that their claws don’t grow into their paws, and make sure that the claws stay trimmed, and so many other things. We need to do the exact same thing for ourselves, for our bodies.

[04:56]  Now, a lot of people really, really struggle with self-care. Most of the coaches that I know teach self-care in some way, shape or form. We always joke around as coaches, like that’s the thing that we want to teach the most is self-care—and it’s usually because it’s the lesson that made the biggest impact on our lives.

[05:23]  That is absolutely true for me. If you put a gun to my head and said, “Tell me the one thing that turned your life around with fibromyalgia. What was the one thing that helped you get better? And you can only choose one.” The one thing I would tell you is learning how to take care of myself. Learning how to listen to my body. Learning how to give my body the tools and the materials she needs so that she can heal.

[05:46]  This is the #1 thing that will make the biggest difference in how you feel. It is also the hardest part of the job. Taking care of yourself when you don’t feel good or when you’re frustrated with the body you live in—when you have a body that doesn’t do the things that you want it to do—can be so, so challenging. I’m going to, hopefully, encourage you in some ways today, give you some different ways of thinking about it, and give you a few other consequences of not taking care of yourself that maybe you haven’t thought of that might help shift this around for you. 

[06:29]  As always, the full transcript and show notes for this, anything that I mention, any resources that I mention, are all going to be available at FibromyalgiaPodcast.com. As you’re listening to this, don’t worry about that. Just go to FibromyalgiaPodcast.com/9, because this is the ninth episode, and you’ll be able to get all of that information.

[06:58]  Let’s talk a little bit about some of the benefits of self-care that maybe you haven’t thought of. Self-care, loving yourself, tending to yourself, of course means we are going to be healthier. A caring environment is always healthier than a bullying environment, which is actually what most of us are providing. Again, I talk a lot about this in Episode 2, so if you’re not sure what I mean by that, just go FibromyalgiaPodcast.com/2 and you’ll see Episode 2.

[07:44]  You just can’t heal if you are always berating yourself or pushing yourself to your breaking point. There was a study that asked law students some questions, then injected them with material that causes an immune response. The greater their optimism on those questions, the better their immune response. They would ask them questions like, “How well do you think you are going to do on the next exam?”, or “How do you think it will be for you after you graduate?” The more optimistic their answers were, the better their immune response. If you are someone who has an autoimmune condition, or if you’re someone who gets sick all the time, or you have trouble healing—you get sick at the drop of a hat, every cold, every flu that goes through, you always get sick—your immune system is not where it should be, and I would be looking at how you think as part of the factors to that.

[08:45]  The other thing that is super important about self-care is that we teach others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves. I’m going to say that again, because this is so, so important. We teach others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves.If you have people who don’t respect your boundaries, look and see if you are respecting your own boundaries. If you have people who are pushing you to do things that you are saying you don’t want to do—let’s say you’re on a diet and you are telling them that you want to eat healthy and someone is pushing chocolate cake at you—I would take a look and see how well you are doing at keeping your own boundaries around eating healthy. Or do you sneak chocolate cake? Right?

[09:30]  I’ll give you an example from my own life. There have been many, many times I have told my husband I want to be in bed by a certain time. I’m just naturally a night owl, so this is something that I’m, literally always working on. I guarantee you, even just this last week I was up way too late a couple of nights, and I am always making a promise to myself: “I am going to go to bed earlier!”

I tell my husband that I need to be in bed by 11 o’clock. Well, the next thing I know we’re sitting there watching TV and, “Oh, just one more episode… Oh, just one more episode.” And he’s saying that to me. Well, he’s saying that because I have shown him that while I’m saying one thing, I am actually doing something else. I am teaching him that, even though I am saying I want to be in bed by 11, what I’m actually saying is that’s really not what I want to do. So, we teach others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves.

[10:35]  The other thing that is super, super important about this is (especially if you have anyone who is looking to you as a mentor, as a role model, as a parent, anyone who is modeling their behavior after yours): you are also teaching others how they should treat themselves by how you treat yourself.

[11:02]  Again, I’ll give you another story from my life. There are so many people in my life who have told me they have learned self-care from me. One of the trips I went on a couple of years ago… I was at a retreat with a bunch of other authors, and there were a few activities I chose to not participate in because I knew it would push me beyond the amount of energy that I had for the day. The thing about this—which, again, this is stuff we will talk about in future episodes so I’m going to keep it short right now, but for me, there’s no drama around that. I do what I have to do to take care of myself. I do not feel like I’m missing out, because I’m actually choosing to save my energy for something that is more important to me so there is no missing out.

[11:54]  I don’t feel bad when people are doing things that I can’t do. I just do what I need to do to take care of myself. A little bit later on that trip, one of my fellow authors came to me and told me that she had actually been dealing with some medical issues the whole time we were there, and that last day she chose to leave the retreat to go see a doctor and get that medical issue taken care of. She did it because she watched me taking care of myself. This happens to me over and over and over again. I cannot tell you how many times I have had people tell me, “I am learning how to take care of myself because I watch how you take care of yourself.”

[12:40]  So #1 — most important: we treat others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves. And #2 — second most important: we are teaching others how they should take care of themselves by how we take care of ourselves.

This is so important if you’ve got kiddos, because they’re watching you every second of every day. If you are always the last person to sit down to dinner, if you don’t take care of yourself, if you are always eating on the run, if you are always putting everybody else before yourself all the time, your kids are going to do that too, because that’s how they are learning how to behave. They are going to grow up and put everybody else before themselves, even when they should be resting because maybe they’ve got the flu. Right? All of those kinds of things, you are teaching your kids.

[13:38]  Now for me—and I alluded to this in the story that I told about being at that retreat—for me, saying NO means I am saying YES to something else. For me, there is no drama. It’s just simply about making a choice. When you have fibromyalgia, your choices are so much more obvious that you have to make them. Right? Everybody is limited to the amount of time and energy and money and brainpower that they have. It’s just with fibromyalgia, it’s so much more obvious, because the amount we have is just a bit smaller.

[14:23]  I was just listening to another podcast, one that I follow. It’s someone who doesn’t have fibromyalgia. It’s another coach, and she was talking about the fact that she’s always having to make choices about how she uses her brain because she only has so much brain power. That’s true for every single person on this planet. I think I know that lesson better than most because, with fibromyalgia, it’s so much more obvious. So, be aware of the choices that you’re making. Don’t go through life and just automatically do stuff and then get to the end of your day and realize you have no energy and wish that you had spent it on something else.

[15:05]  I think energy is a lot like money. You are allotted a certain amount of it, and if you aren’t conscious about how you spend it—I think every single one of us has probably gotten a tax return or a bonus or birthday money or something—and unless you are purposeful about how you spend that, you get to a certain point and think, “Where did it go?!” And that is how many of us are with our energy when we have fibromyalgia. I think we have to budget our energy just like we budget money. Be thinking about the choices you are making and how you want to spend it. So, for me, saying NO is actually about saying YES [Episode 12].

[15:52]  Steve Jobs has a quote that I love. He says, “It’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” Have you ever found yourself so busy, spending your energy? (I almost said money because they are very correlated in my brain!) Have you ever found yourself spending energy on doing busy work and things that really aren’t important to you, and then you find yourself crashed out on the couch and can’t do the things that are important to you? Saying NO, and practicing good self-care, is what allows you to spend your energy, spend your brain power, and spend your good days on the things that are most important to you.

[16:42]  Let’s talk a little bit about some of the barriers to self-care. I think this is a big thing that people don’t talk about enough. I think a big one for most of society is guilt. We feel bad saying no. We feel bad taking time for ourselves. We feel as though we are being a bad person or selfish person.

[17:10]  But, every single one of you listening here, even if you’ve never been on an airplane yourself, I know that you know what they say when they are giving their instructions before they can take off. Right? They talk about how to use the seat belt, and how to use the life vest or life preserver. They also talk about the oxygen mask, right? Right? So, what do they say? They say to put your oxygen mask on first before trying to help someone else. The point of that, in that over-dramatic way, is if the airplane is in crisis, and you have to have oxygen in order to live, you can’t help anybody else if you are dead. Right? You’ve got to put your oxygen mask on so that you have oxygen, so that you can stay conscious in order to be able to help somebody else. That’s why they say that.

[18:18]  Well, on a smaller, less dramatic level, if you don’t take care of yourself with your fibromyalgia, if you don’t manage your energy, if you don’t keep your pain levels low, if you don’t rest when you need to rest, you will not be able to take care of the people around you. You won’t be able to do your job. You won’t be able to take care of your kids. You won’t be able to be the wife you want to be. Taking care of yourself is actually a prerequisite. It’s something you have to do before you can take care of anybody else.

[18:58]  It’s why, when people want to become a Fibromyalgia Coach, the first part of our training program is actually having them work with a Coach on their own fibromyalgia, so that they can start to feel better first. You can’t help anybody if you are flat on your back with a 10 level of pain with no energy. You cannot help anybody. And, so… You’ve got to start making choices to put yourself first, so that you have something to offer people.

[19:33]  Guilt is a biggy, but honestly, guys, we’ve just got to get over it. It is selfish to not take care of yourself, because if you don’t take care of yourself you can’t take care of anybody else.

[19:49]  Now, there may be some spiritual components to this for you. Growing up in a Christian house, reading my Bible, reading about the “Proverbs 31 Woman” that got up early and made the clothes and did the shopping and burned the midnight oil and did all the things… It kind of sets up a little bit of an unrealistic expectation for what we can actually do as women. And that’s a whole other topic and not what this podcast is about! But I just want to point out that there may be a lot of factors to this.

[20:27]  This may be more complicated for you to unravel. You may need help from a spiritual advisor, your priest, a pastor, or peer counselor if it’s all revolving around your relationship with God and how you practice your spirituality. If there are a lot of things coming up as I talk about this, if there are a lot of things coming up in here—maybe about past abuse or relationships where people didn’t treat you the way my husband treated me—there may be some things that you need to talk to a trained counselor or a psychiatrist or psychotherapist about. There may be some other things going on there. You made need a counselor. You may need a spiritual advisor. A coach may be fine working with you just to help remind you that what you’re doing is good and right and that you shouldn’t feel guilty.

[21:26]  Another big barrier to self-care is that a lot of people just don’t know how to do it. They are so out of touch with this new fibromyalgia body they are living in. They really don’t know what that new body wants. They don’t know what the limits are on this new fibro body. They don’t know how much energy they actually have. They don’t know what makes them feel better. They don’t know what makes them feel worse.

[21:52]  In my first book Take Back Your Life,there is a whole exercise about how to start discovering what your body wants, what it needs, and how to help her feel her best. If you want to grab a free download of my book, just go to FibromyalgiaPodcast.com. You’ll see Books on the menu—just go there and you can grab a free copy of Take Back Your Life. It’s in the self-care chapter, “How can I help myself?”

There is a section in there that talks about The Book of Me—figuring out the things that make you feel better and the things that make you feel worse. This is something we actually do a lot as coaches with our clients, is really help them get more in touch with their bodies and what helps them feel better and what makes them feel worse.

[22:45]  Another big barrier to self-care is just simply bad habits. There are things that maybe you are doing automatically, not even thinking about it. Practice makes habits. So, if there is something you have done many, many times, like maybe you sit down to watch a movie, you’re hungry, and you made some popcorn. You do that a few times, and automatically, as soon as you sit down to a movie, your brain wants popcorn, even when you’re not hungry. Right? So, practicing some new healthier habits can help squeeze out those old less healthy habits. The same goes for self-care.

[23:28]  Maybe your default answer to everything is to say yes and to help people. Maybe you need to practice a new default answer, which is, “Let me do some checking and get back to you on if I can do that.” This is also where working with a coach is super helpful because we are actually trained on how to see these things. We are trained on how to change habits. We’re trained on how to help people develop new healthy habits and can help you see from the outside looking in. We can help give you an idea of, maybe, some of those unhealthy habits that you’ve got going on that you aren’t even aware that you’re doing.

[24:11]  There’s also a huge disconnect between our brains and our bodies. Those of us with fibromyalgia, a lot of times we check out right here at the neck, and we kind of ignore everything down below—which we’ve done, basically, to just survive. We’ve kind of had to tune out our body in order to survive, and tuning back in can be a challenge. I know there are many, many of you who feel like there’s the real you—the person you think you are, the person that you used to be—then there’s your body or who you are today. Right?

[24:52]  An example might be: you used to be super, super active and be able to survive on coffee and five hours of sleep, and you just can’t do that anymore. A lot of it is tuning back into who you are right now, today, in the body that you’re living in right now. Today!  

[25:15]  A lot of people also say one of their barriers to self-care is time and money. I just want to be blunt herethis is totally not a barrier, because is self-care is not about time and it’s not about money. At all. You can take care of yourself—you can tend to your body’s needs and you can love yourselfwithout spending any money or any time. So this is just a bunch of hooey. Okay? So, you guys know better now than to tell me you can’t take care of yourself because of time or money.

[25:51]  Remember: self-care is not about massages. It’s not about vacations at the beach. These are things we can do in the name of self-care, but we do them because we’re caring for ourselves. They are not self-care. Just like if you had a child or a pet, we feed them because we love them. Feeding them is not loving them.

[26:22]  Do you see what I am saying? We do one because of how we feel, it is not how we feel. It’s all about your attitude toward yourself. It does not have to cost you any time and it doesn’t have to cost you any money. I will tell you the #1 thing I do for self-care is rubbing The Belly of Happiness and Joy—which is petting the cat. My big Sam is over twenty pounds now. He’s like a 20-something pound Maine Coon, and he usually sits right here next to me. He doesn’t happen to be here right now, but he usually sits right here next to me, and he loves to have his belly rubbed. That is my #1 thing that I do for self-care: just pet the cat. Rub his gorgeous belly of happiness and joy. He’s like a Buddha, you know? You rub the Buddha belly.

[27:23]  I’m going to give you a few exercises to do, and I don’t mean go out and exercise. I mean worksheet kind of exercises. These are a few exercises to help you start your self-care. The first thing I want you to do is start what I call your “Joy List.” [See Episode 13 for a full walkthrough on how to add more joy to your life.

I want you to think about the things that give you joy. What makes you happy? What fills up your heart and your soul, so that you have something that you can offer others? What fills you up, makes you feel more whole, makes you happy, brings you joy? I want you to just start making a list of this. It could be on your phone. Maybe you just start a notes app on your phone and just start listing it every time you think of something that makes you happy. “Belly of Happiness and Joy.” Write it down. You can write “massage” on there if you want to, but I want to make sure you are also choosing things that don’t cost any money or any time.

[28:33]  The other exercise I want you to start right now is your “Book of You.” I want you to write down your “owner’s manual.” I want you to start making note of the things you know to be true for you. That could be things like: I feel my best when I sleep until at least nine o’clock in the morning. It could be: I always get a migraine headache when I’m in a room with fluorescent lights. Or it could be: listening to calming music when I’m getting ready in the morning helps me start the day more calm.  

[29:16]  Or it could be… I’m going to give you one which a client of mine gave me, which I love. She did this little exercise and sent me a list, and all in caps written out on her list was “NEVER EVER EVER EAT CHEETOS AGAIN!” And I love it because you can tell she’s done this before. It wasn’t just “don’t eat Cheetos”. It was all in caps, and it was never ever ever eat Cheetos again! This is why we want to write it down, because it’s so easy to forget. We’ll eat Cheetos and then feel terrible and be like, “Oh! Don’t eat the Cheetos.”And then months will pass and your husband will bring some [Cheetos] home and so you eat a few and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I feel terrible! Don’t eat the Cheetos!” So, write it down and make notes of what you know to be true—both what makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad.

[30:23]  I also want you to make notes of things that may or may not be true—the things you’re trying to figure out. For instance, maybe you want to put down: “How much sleep do I really need at night? I always feel like I don’t have enough. This is something I need to experiment with.” Or, maybe, you might experiment with: “If I have to lead a workshop on the weekend, do I need to take a day off during the week?” There could be so many things.

[30:55]  One of the things I jotted down in my “Book of Me” was: “My body wants a hot bath every night.” That’s what I wrote down, because I was just thinking, just kind of talking to my body… “So, Body, what is it that you would like? What do you want? What would make you feel good?” The impression I got was, “I want a hot bath every night.” So, I wrote it down thinking, “That’s not happening, but okay.” I wrote down: “My body wants a hot bath every night.” One of the things I experimented with was: Do I really need one every night? Or is this just another tool I can use when I think I need a little extra self-care or when I’ve been doing too much and I need extra recovery? Maybe that’s when I need to use a bathwhich, actually, is exactly what I do.

[31:56]  And if something comes up, please don’t be afraid to add it. Trust that intuition, trust your body. That’s one of the things that self-care is. It’s actually listening to your body and not discounting it. Like, pretend your body is a person that you care about, and listen to those tiny little things, those little whispers, that make you wonder, “Hmm… I don’t know. Is that real?” Pay attention and then examine it. Test it out. See how it works. See what happens.

Remember, this is not a commitment or a list of things that you must do or that you have to do or that you should do. This is a list of things that would make your body feel better or make it feel worse, and you could totally choose to do them or not do them.

[32:53]  I want you to think about your senses as you go through this.

Think about touch. For instance, scratchy fabrics may really send your fibromyalgia into overdrive and really make your skin hurt. So, maybe, you think about touch.

Think about sight—the things that you see. Maybe fluorescent lights, or flashing lights, or blue light in the evening that can keep you from falling asleep.

Think about sound. Think about the kinds of music, soothing sounds, and noises that might calm you, or noises that might stress you out. One of the things I’m super sensitive to, speaking of fluorescent lights, is that little buzzing that they make when they’re starting to go out. That is totally a headache trigger for me. So, realizing that is like, “Okay, you need to fix that or I need to find somewhere else to be.

[33:49]  Think about taste. Think about foods that make you feel good or foods that might make you feel bad.

Think about smells. Maybe things like essential oils make you feel better or maybe they’re a trigger for you. Maybe scents are too much for you. Maybe they trigger your asthma. I can smell a cigarette from five miles away, even when it was like three days old. I’m super sensitive to cigarette smells. So, think about those kinds of things.

[34:21]  I also want you to think about people and places. Who do you hang around with that makes you feel better? Who feels like an energy vampire to you that just sucks all the energy out of you. Think about the people you can handle in certain amounts. Like you might have certain friends or even family members that you can be around for maybe an hour or two, but that you couldn’t spend a whole day with. Start paying attention to those things.

[34:51]  Think about driving. Think about restaurants. Think about chairs that you sit in. There are some coffee shops that I’ve been in… There’s this trend right now of going kind of industrial in coffee shops, and so the chairs are hard and uncomfortable. I can’t be there as long as someplace that has more comfortable chairs. These are the things that you need to be jotting down to help you remember when you forget.

[35:23]  Start your list of things that are true for you and your body. Start your lists, your “Joy List” of things that make you happyand I don’t want you to edit either of these lists. I just want you to write it down. We will talk in future episodes about what to do with all of this, but for right now I want you to just start getting back in touch with what makes your body feel good, what makes your body feel worse, what brings joy to your spirit and makes you happy and fills you up. Start purposefully adding more of this into your life, so that you are full of joy and energy and health to be able to start taking care of other people.

[36:14]  And, again, if you need any help with this, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or reach out to a friend or a pastor or counselor or someone. These are very difficult things to walk through on your own, because so much of society has told us that it’s selfish and it’s wrong—and we need to start shifting that. We need to start learning the practice of caring for ourselves, of tending to our bodies and building ourselves up so that we can have something to offer. Okay?

[33:56]  As always, the transcript and show notes are going to be out there at FibromyalgiaPodcast.com/9 for Episode 9. I will have links to the books that I mentioned. I’m also going to have links to the worksheets. If you’re a person who likes worksheets, I have a “Getting to Know You” worksheet that will help you build that list of what makes your body feel better and what makes your body feel worse. And, also, a “Joy List” worksheet. Those links will be on the website FibromyalgiaPodcast.com/9.

[37:34]  Then, you’ll also be able to grab copies of my books. I go into the subjects so much deeper in my first book, Take Back Your Life, and so I hope you will grab that. And stay tuned for future episodes—this topic is going to come up over and over because, like I said, learning truly to connect with my body, listen to my body, and take care of myself the way that I need to be taken care of to be at my best, is probably the #1 thing that has gotten me to where I am today.

[38:08]  Alright, you guys. That’s it for this episode!

Next episode, I am super excited about! It will be our very first Ask the Coach or Dear Tami episode. I’ve gotten several emails and Facebook messages with questions, and so we’ll just have to see how many I can get to on the next episode, but I am so excited to answer your questions.

Those of you who send in a message, if I can’t fit it into the episode, don’t worry we’ll give you an answer anyway. We will also be doing future episodes. We will be doing this special Ask the Coach or Dear Tami episode every ten episodes. The next one will be the 10th [episode], and then one on the 20th episode, 30th episode and so on. There’s plenty of time for you to send in more questions for future episodes.

[39:05]  Thanks so much for being here. It is such an honor to have you listen. This is one of the first recordings I’ve done since we officially launched. Most of the episodes were [recorded] before this podcast launched, so I just want to thank you all for the reviews you’ve put out there, for the stars that you’ve put out there, and all of your subscribing to the podcast and listening in. It means so much to me, and it’s what keeps me going.

[39:45]  My favorite review so far is the one that said she’s feeling HOPE again. For those of you who don’t know—HOPE is my word. I exist in this world to encourage HOPE. So, anytime I hear someone say that, it just makes my day.

Thanks again to all of you, and we will see you back here for another episode of the Fibromyalgia Podcast as we talk about all of your questions. Bye guys!

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