Maintaining Good Habits With MS Isn't Always Easy
In my humble opinion, one of the many prerequisites for living a successful life (however you may personally define that) with multiple sclerosis (MS) is learning to be able to stay organized and maintain good habits. Habits that allow you to keep your life as balanced as possible and your health (both physical and mental) as stable as can be. All this in order to help you keep the machine that you call "your life" operating smoothly because when one part stops functioning as it should, that usually means that every other part suffers. It took me years to figure this “simple” concept out and I would say that I've barely scratched the surface of how to actually implement it in a way that actually works...
Maintaining healthy habits with MS
Let me put it this way: I obviously don't know how to make my life perfect, but I do know how to make it better. I don't know how to totally solve my insomnia issues (for example), but I do know how to get better sleep so that insomnia isn't as destructive to the unbelievably sensitive equilibrium I call my life. Continuing with the insomnia example, I have a series of good habits that I've come to adopt over the years that have shown (in my case) to actually help improve my sleep quality. As a result, this helps to keep “the machine” running. However, here lies the problem; while all the good habits that I've developed greatly improve my quality of life, they only do so when I can maintain them... as soon as I lose control of just one of these habits, the house of cards that I've carefully built seems to come crashing down.
Good habits are not easy to maintain
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I feel like my ability to keep my life with MS running as smoothly as possible is kind of like riding an old bike with a loose chain. It seems to ride fine so long as you don't "push things too hard," but when you do? When the balance of your life is disrupted just a little bit by something like a cold, a stressful life event, or an especially hot day? It's like that bike chain falls off and you have to pull over and fidget with it until you get things back on track. Otherwise? Well, you're not going to be moving forward... I feel like this happens for primarily one reason; maintaining the good habits that "keep your bike chain from falling off" or "keep the house of cards that you've built from crashing down"? Is not easy...
MS makes it difficult to stay discliplined
This is where I struggle to come up with an answer. Not long ago, I would have boasted about how much self-discipline I have. I was organized, good at sticking to a strict schedule, and good at not letting myself stray from any of the good habits that made up my life. But, at some point, this changed... and I'm not sure if that's a reflection of me having lost my self-discipline or of my MS having simply made it more difficult to stay as disciplined as I was before. Basically, did I lose the self-discipline that I once had or does my life with MS now require so much more self-discipline than I've ever had? I honestly don't know because I can make really good arguments for both possibilities...
It doesn't take much to kick me off track
Regardless, that's sort of beside the point I'm trying to make. My point is that, at least for me, creating a good habit to help improve some aspect of my life with MS is typically pretty straightforward, and implementing it is usually easy. But maintaining it? That's what's really difficult because it doesn't seem to take much at all to kick me off track, and I imagine that most others can say the same. When the weight of your fatigue has exponentially increased, when the momentum of your vertigo has become far more violent than usual, or when one of the countless other MS calamities has knocked you down, it can be tough to stick to the good habits that you know serve an important purpose. That play some sort of key role in keeping the machine that is your life running smoothly. I’ve yet to discover a solid solution for this…
How do you maintain good habits?
Do you feel like your life with MS is easily pushed off track? Like you spend all this time building a house of cards out of good habits to manage your MS only to see it come crashing down in an instance as soon as one, tiny, little thing doesn't line up just right? How do YOU maintain good habits and keep from straying from them? Share your experience and tips below in the comments!
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