Unmanaged autoimmune disease can take over almost every aspect of your life. For example mental health, social life, relationships, and many more. To manage your autoimmune disease you first have to understand it fully. To fight back you have to know what you’re up against. In today’s post I’m going to cover how to make your own toolbox to help you manage your autoimmune disease.
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Right now I’m on a journey of not only managing my Autoimmune diseases but also healing. If you want to check out some blog posts about how I am healing click here.
Why should you keep a medical binder?
Your medical binder will be your best tool for managing your autoimmune disease. Keeping a symptom tracker, medication tracker, daily activity level log, mood tracker and food intolerance tracker. Will help you quickly see a pattern of what is causing flare ups. We have all of these on our Resource Library page for free. Also keeping a medical binder helps doctors appointments run by smoother because you have all the data right in front of you.
Keeping a medical binder is the first step in understanding how your diseases effects you on every level, what makes you feel better, what triggers symptoms, etc. Your medical binder will be your “autoimmune toolbox”.
Discovering your triggers
To learn my triggers I started by researching my Autoimmune diseases focusing on what the known triggers are. From there I already had a pretty good idea of what I was going to track from my lifestyle. But I quickly realized it wasn’t the known triggers I actually had to look out for, it was the ones that were personal to me. I spent a few weeks diligently tracking my Autoimmune diseases and all lifestyle factors. Like diet, emotions, mental state, sleep schedule, element exposure, etc.
After a few weeks, the close tracking I had been doing on my lifestyle. I started seeing crystal clear patterns. I was once again reminded the triggers I had to look out for were the little lifestyle choices I had thought nothing of before. That was actually making me sicker. My diet and unregulated emotions were the biggest hidden triggers for me.
Known triggers for Autoimmune diseases
- Western diet of high sugar low fiber
- food intolerances
- unregulated sleep schedule
- Unregulated stress
- Element exposure
Learning to manage your triggers
To learn how to manage my triggers I continued – and still to this day track everything I eat, mood, element exposure, etc. Keeping a log allowed me to learn what helped and what harmed my diseases. After starting the AIP diet (Autoimmune Protocol diet) and narrowing down what my personal food sensitivities were I had an even better idea of how to manage my diet to work with my disease. But that’s just what worked for me – do your own research, talk to your doctor, and figure out what’s best for you! It was a lot of research, trial, and error that got me to where I am at today!
For more info on what got me to even try the AIP diet and learning to manage my Autoimmune diseases. Check out our post on “Why I chose a functional medicine approach to healing my Autoimmune disease”.
Emotional intelligence
Lastly, I wanted to talk about managing emotions. Managing my emotions was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do on my Autoimmune journey. Constantly being in an emotional state keeps you from thinking clearly, tires you out, and affects your autoimmune diseases. Learning to control my emotions made me more consistent, happy, productive, level headed, and was one of my biggest hidden triggers to flare-ups.
Started learning to manage my emotions by paying attention to how I was feeling. I give the emotion I am feeling a name, I allow myself to process what I am feeling, and then I let it go. Detaching instead of ruminating on emotions has been the biggest game changer. I consciously make an effort to take care of my mental and emotional health because It 100% affects my physical health.
Stress effects Autoimmune diseases and unmanaged emotions quickly turn into stressors. I didn’t know how to manage my emotions I thought it was normal to constantly be unhappy, live in fear, be upset, and deal with internal turmoil. I now know there is a much healthier way to cope with emotions and it started with acknowledging what was going on and digging to find the root cause. To understand a little more about stress and autoimmunity click here to read a blog post we have on it!
Managing your autoimmune disease is full of trial and error, but in my experience it’s more than worth it to have my life back. Taking care of yourself is the only way to improve your autoimmune disease. It can be hard at times, but you are not alone. Check out are tik tok to be a part of the autoimmune community.
