De-Stress from AS - Try these 10 Tips

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. I hope everyone is doing fantastic. This week's message is all about ways to distress yourself and you know how, to hopefully put yourself in a better position with your Ankylosing Spondylitis and your mental state.

This last week has been a bit of a challenge as my family moves through the one year anniversary of my father's passing. So you know, kind of some stressful items dealing with, thinking about, and I started looking and thinking what are ways that I can help myself to feel better, to move through this at an easier pace. I did turn to some meditation to help with the process just to really calm my mind and then look at some pictures and things like that. But how do I carry this forward for Ankylosing Spondylitis when it's not some kind of major anniversary but just in the day to day life, that we deal with having Ankylosing Spondylitis always present.

So I came across this article that was titled De-Stress with AS: 10 Strategies to Ease Your Mind(link at end of show notes). And I thought, you know what I’ll read through them and there's a lot of really good information in it. As we all know, stress can trigger a lot of things. But for Ankylosing Spondylitis, the worst thing that we can get from stress is a flare, because we don't know how long that flare is going to last. And sometimes we can control it with medication and other times it runs amok and it's just over the top and we have no ability to rein it in until it decides it wants to stop. That alone is enough to try and keep stress at bay and it's really something we want to focus on as much as possible. There are many ways to de-stress you know, including properly treating your AS, practicing some relaxation techniques, talking to someone or just finding joy in a favorite hobby or extracurricular activity. So you may experience stress, you know, for multiple reasons, if you have Ankylosing Spondylitis with all the stuff going on right now with the COVID around the world, it could be financial health, all sorts of things are going on that can cause stress and lead to flares. Stress can lead to AS flares as I said, by creating tension in your body and triggering a response from your immune system. And once that happens, again, it's run amok and we don't have any easy way to control it. We can, again use medications to help to reel it in, but you know, that may or may not work. So what we want to do is proactively try to reduce stress, which may help to calm your mind and reduce or prevent additional ankylosing spondylitis symptoms. So, you know, try some of these methods.

Number one, Stick to Your Treatment Plan. One critical factor for managing Ankylosing Spondylitis is to stick with what the doctor recommended to you. This generally can help to reduce flares, not all the time, but it can help to reduce flares. And maybe that can help to alleviate some stress. So they provided a checklist of things and your treatment plan may include checking in with your doctor regularly, seeing a physical therapist, or similar medical professional, staying active and eating a healthy diet, taking medications as directed, especially during flares, resting when needed, and avoiding smoking. Now, most of those I've done for pretty much my whole life. I never smoked, resting you know, when you're a young guy, you go, go, go, go and same with people that everybody else when you're young, you just go like crazy. So you get as much rest as you can and you just deal with it that way. Now, taking medications is, in my opinion, very important. When I was younger, there were no biologics and when I got to point where I could take them the type Humira and Enbrel didn't work long term for me. So that was something that it wasn't until about three years ago that I was prescribed a different medication, a biologic Cosentyx that worked...