I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on injury and mindset. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend a long time injured, I don’t know. But while I’m certainly not an expert on the topic, I can tell you with some confidence that how you think about an injury, and yourself with that injury, affects your experience. Mindset matters.

Before we dive in, there’s another mindset piece at play in the reading of this piece, so let’s address that one first: Comparison isn’t helpful. It can be tempting to compare your injury to another person’s and dismiss their experience because they haven’t been injured for as long as you have, or it’s a different injury, obtained in a different way. Or, you may think that your experience matters less if others are more seriously injured than you, or injured more often, or if their injury seems to have a greater impact on their life. If you find yourself comparing, just stop. Stop it now. This is about you (well, actually, it’s about me), not other people. Each of us has an injury experience that is valid and specific.

Go ahead and relate to others, though. Empathize and share your experience. We can learn from each other. 

Okay, then. You’re injured. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been injured too, and I thought that by sharing some of what I’ve learned that it may help you.

1. Figure out if you are willing to address mindset

If you are reading this and feeling irritated with the idea of mindset—“Hey, this is a physical injury and what does how I think about it have to do with anything and it’s not like I can just ignore it and it’s really uncomfortable and I’m so frustrated and this is about my body not my mind!”—well, you may have already snorted in disgust and stopped reading.

Or you might recognize yourself in this, be tired of feeling powerless against the demands and limitations of physical injury, and want to tame the frustration.

I didn’t have a good handle on my mindset when I last got injured, despite already dealing with another long-term injury. As time went on and I wasn’t healing, I felt increasingly frustrated and sad, and I experienced some dark days. I was feeling very unlike myself. But it soon became clear to me that I needed—wanted—to do some work to reframe my experience and positively influence my daily mindset and overall outcome.

It’s okay to feel however you’re feeling about your injury. But know that you can choose to make the injury experience easier on yourself by working on your mindset. Are you willing?

2. Hold on to your power

Injury isn’t punishment; it’s not karma in action. You don’t deserve to be injured and you are not being tested.

Yes, sometimes injury is preventable, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it exposes a weakness; other times it is simply the effect of an overwhelming force. The injury itself doesn’t have an agenda—it’s neutral. But whether you saw it coming or you were blindsided doesn’t really matter. Your injury doesn’t reflect your worthiness.

Ascribing meaning—like the idea of punishment—to an injury gives your power away.

Why the injury happened is less important than what you are going to do about it now, and taking action requires that you believe in your ability to shape your future.

3. Look for support and participate in your recovery

Other people have a range of skills, perspectives, and good advice that they can share with you—if you let them.

I’ve started to think of this as gathering my team. I will recruit medical doctors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, massage therapists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and coaches, and I’ll keep those on the roster who prove their worth. There are practitioners in addition to these that may be useful to you. Gathering such a team is a privilege, to be sure.

I also recruit friends and family, because these are the folks I will call upon when I need to vent or need a boost or need to share a win. This is a privilege too, of a different kind.

The point, though, is that the team can’t do the work for you. You have to be a team player and contribute what your team needs to successfully provide support. In other words, your job on the team is to follow the protocol, do your rehab exercises, and share your feelings. Others can only help you if you faithfully participate.

4. Get your injury diagnosed

For me, this has been critical, twice over. Some would disagree about the importance of this, particularly if the treatment and recovery plan are the same regardless of the exact nature of the injury. I understand this thinking and I agree with it—generally, at least—in terms of moving forward to address the physical side of the injury, but it may not be what you need to address mindset.

Especially if the injury doesn’t appear to be improving.

Figuring out the nature of the injury allowed me a clearer picture of what I could expect in terms of recovery, which let me adjust my expectations, reset my goals, conserve the energy I was expending on never-ending internet searches, and, ultimately, accept where I was at.

5. Work on your resilience

I’m an optimizer: When something is important to me, I like to do everything I can to support that thing in the most effective and efficient way possible. So with an injury, I want to know what I can do (or not do) to heal faster and stronger. This includes doing work to prevent the injury from happening again.

Even if the injury didn’t directly result from a weakness, there is likely something you can do to strengthen the greater system that will benefit you the next time you are exposed to physical stress or trauma. Getting stronger—or more mobile, or flexible, or skilled—is something related to the injury that you can influence and make progress on. This increases your overall resilience, which may prevent future injury, or lessen its impact, or help you heal faster should it happen.

Doing the work to increase your resilience is about taking action, and taking action gives you something positive to focus your attention on.

6. Relax into the rehab and recovery process

For me, this was only possible once I knew what I was dealing with and had a plan. Prior to that, I couldn’t let go of the search for answers, and it was exhausting.

Knowledge and a plan allowed me to settle into the moment and find a training and recovery groove that left energy for other things. Once I did this, everything felt a little easier, more manageable, less catastrophic. I could trust the process, do the work, and mentally move on.

If you can relax into it without having to first chase down answers, please do. But whenever you manage it, you’ll feel less anxious and have more energy. And you’ll likely find joy in more things.

7. Let go of a timeline

The only thing I wanted more than to know whenI could expect to have healed from my injury was to actually have healed from my injury. The when was critical to my ability to plan for the future, and boy, do I like to plan. I’m also not very patient. So not knowing when I’d be done with my injury was excruciating, until I eventually let it go.

I’m not sure whether I’ve actually learned the skill of patience in a way that I can willingly apply it elsewhere, though I hope so. My experience has been, simply, that some injuries take a really long time to resolve, and there’s a point, after you’ve learned all you can and enacted everything you can think of to hustle healing along, where all that’s left to do is wait for the tissues to heal. 

Waiting is difficult at the best of times, when you know how long it will take. Waiting for something that will happen, at some point, eventually, is impossible to pace. The best thing to do is to stop waiting altogether. And that means letting go of a timeline.

So stop waiting and start working on other things (see #8).

8. Establish new goals unrelated to the injury

Chances are that you can work around your injury to train other parts of the body. See this as an opportunity to work on weaknesses or develop new skills and commit to their improvement.

Like I did, you may discover an affinity for a type of movement or training you didn’t know you could enjoy. It’s even possible that you may like the new focus so much that it takes precedence even after your injury resolves. But at worst, you’ll get stronger or more skilled at something, and that can only be useful.

As you work on your new goals, seeing progress over time, that long wait (see #7) for your injury to heal may diminish a bit in its hold over you, and reaching new training goals even while injured takes much of the sting away.

It’s possible, of course, that your injury is such that physical training of nearly any kind isn’t recommended right now. If that’s the case, respect it, and look for non-physical goals you can pursue.

9. Embrace (or discover) your whole identity

You are not your injury, or your activity.

It can be easy to lose perspective and think of yourself as “someone with hip pain,” for example, as if that could describe the whole you. (It can’t.) You are also not your activity; even while you were running/cycling/climbing/weightlifting, this was never the totality of your identity. You are a whole, complex person, injured or not, doing your chosen activity or not.

A relatively minor injury may sideline you for a while, but don’t let it question who you are; you can be a runner who isn’t running right now. Conversely, a relatively major injury may require that you stop running altogether. This isn’t easy to deal with, and you may feel lost without it, but I can tell you from experience that there will be something else you can get passionate about. You will find it if you look. But this new thing will not become the entirety of your identity either, because you are never only one thing.

So who are you? Who do you want to be? And how do you want to spend your time? If your injury results in you having a little more space to reflect on this, it’s only a good thing.

10. Decide how you want to think about the experience

Injury can have a meaningful effect on your life. It doesn’t have to, but it can, and the effect can be positive or negative. Do you want the sum total of the experience to be negative? Or would you rather look for the positives, the things that enrich your life, the silver linings?

This doesn’t mean that the injury itself has meaning and power (see #2). Rather, you have the power to frame the experience into something that ultimately helps you achieve your goals. It’s a choice. The earlier you can decide how you want to benefit from your experience of injury, the sooner you can focus on those gains and enjoy their benefits. I’m choosing to value the gains made from my experience with injury—in mindset, strength, patience, and new skills—over anything I may have lost.

. . .

Now, am I always successful with my own mindset work? Do I do all of these things, perfectly, all of the time? Hell, no. But I don’t think that’s the point.

This is not a quest for perfection and there’s no need to beat yourself up for taking some time to wallow or for just not feeling like doing your rehab exercises this morning. All things take practice, and mindset is no exception. The more you work on it, the better you’ll get.

The big lesson is understanding the enormous importance of mindset in the experience of injury and that we have the power to influence our own stories. I know what I want my story to be. Do you?

First published as a multi-part series from August 30 to October 2, 2019, Instagram (@shanajstone) and Facebook.