Dealing With Your Emotions When You Have Arthritis

Arthritis is a physical disease, but it has emotional ramifications. You may wonder about the kinds of emotions you may encounter, and the truth is that you are going to encounter many feelings you may not know how to handle. This article contains information about what you may experience and how you can deal with these emotions to help yourself better cope with your arthritis.

One of the first emotions you will start feeling is anger. You may not feel like you deserve arthritis, and you may feel angry that you have done nothing wrong but have gotten a disease that may affect you for the rest of your life. This is a natural reaction to an arthritis diagnosis, but you have to stop and think for a moment. Anger is an emotion that can often times be destructive since you focus on your feelings about the situation at hand instead of looking to the solution. Channel your anger into finding ways you can still maintain the life you live. Find out how others have dealt with arthritis and can still do activities they enjoy.

You might also feel afraid. Fear is also a very normal reaction. You may not know what it means to have arthritis; you may have known people with terrible arthritis and be afraid that you will turn into them. The truth is, you don't know what will happen. You can, however, prepare yourself and arm yourself with knowledge. Find out as much as possible about your disease. Keep a journal that helps you know what causes a flare-up of symptoms. Stop smoking. Engage in light exercise such as yoga or swimming in order to keep your body active and full of motion.

Another way for you to handle your fear is to get a handle on the stress that you are feeling. Stress can be very dangerous to your overall ability to handle arthritis. Stress makes everything worse, if you let it. When you are feeling more stressed out, the pain from arthritis can get worse. A lot of people think of stress as some minor mental disturbance, but stress can actually cause physical problems, and often does. You need to learn techniques to healthily handle the stress you feel at any given time.

Hopefully, one day you will start to feel a sense of hope and acceptance. If you just take one day at a time, and do what the other tips suggest, you will find that your life is manageable and that you can too enjoy your life in spite of your arthritis.

Now you know that there is a great deal you can feel when you have arthritis. Your challenge is to make sure that you handle these emotions in a healthy way, now that you know you can expect them. Understand what you're going through so that you can feel better; once you start dealing with your emotions you will find that the physical discomfort is easier to handle.