A personal story or How I applied a growth mindset and my Control Gate tool

My flares have a pattern… we all have… Mine usually start with a massive depression, followed by the physical aspect (pain on my right side in my arm, shoulder, and hand).

I got a lot of depression since… mmm… forever? Who was there first? The depression or MS? The chicken or the egg? To me, depression was there when I was a child but MS was certainly not far behind, hiding… Anyway, I have been spiraling down many many times… not this time, not anymore. I still get depression. It is sadly a really common symptom of MS. That is the part I cannot control. I have MS and depression; it is a fact. What I can control though are the triggers before the depression happen and my tools to get me out of it. This time, the triggers that I saw coming were too much. There have been sadly a lot going on in my life lately… a lot of stress… difficult relationships, financial pressure due to some building at home and changes in work, health issue for me (my fertility journey on the top of MS) and loved ones, and not helping either, the weather has been quite crappy here in Southland…. Did I forgot to deal with these triggers, or did I ignore them? Depression showed up. I hate it. It is such a painful feeling. I had 2 choices: going down with it or looking for a way out… through the control gate… I also had 2 boxes: my triggers and my tools. I got all my triggers out and pass them one by one through the gate. It’s hard to face them but harder to ignore them and drown in depression. For each of them, I identify what I could control or not. There was no point wasting time and energy (which was already low) on what I cannot control. I cannot change the weather… Then I looked at my pile of controllable or rectifiable triggers and matched them with my tools: Reaching out, asking for help, talking and sharing my feelings and worries, soothing the hurt through meditation and self-care (I dived into an easy-to-read romantic book), went for a little road trip with my husband and got my stress triggers sorted one by one, little by little… My growth mindset regarding my health moves me out of the flare. A fixed mindset would have kept me in the mud I was in… Obviously, it is not an instant fix. The day following my depression, my arm was in terrible pain, my hand locked, I got scared… but what would have lasted a week or more in the past, was just one day this time. Funnily I saw my neurologist a few days later… he’s happy, said there is nothing new just some old scars that show up time to time… and encouraged me to keep going. We spent most of my consultation talking about food and … mindset.

I wonder, what is your pattern? How can you identify it? How could you apply a growth mindset to it?