This was actually a tip from a career counsellor, but I've found it works great for professional patients as well. If you've been living with chronic pain for a while, it can be a tough strain on your self worth. You can't do the things you used to, relationships suffer when you don't have time or energy to participate the way you could if you were healthy. It's easy to start feeling pretty bad about yourself after a while, and that doesn't exactly help your health.
In a situation like this it's especially important to supply yourself with encouragement, and take good care of the positive input that you get.
"You're such a good listener!" Sometimes people say nice things about you. It could be in an sms, on a card, in an email or face to face. It is heartwarming then and there, but in the day to day living with a chronic pain condition, we soon forget who said what, when and why. Today's pain-free tip is to try to preserve compliments and pieces of encouragement in some way, write them down if possible. You can have a secret place where you collect uplifting messages. A drawer for cards and notes, maybe a document where you copy&paste in nice things from emails. That way you can remind yourself... bring them out when you've had a bad flare or if you start to forget who you are apart from your illness.
