How did you break your conditoned responses ? Any tips would be appreciated

I have a few conditioned responses which don't make any sense . Even though logically I know it's just a conditioned response but my body reacts negatively if I continue engaging them . So any tips on how did you navigate such responses would be very helpful for me as well

 

I have been starting to tackle some of mine lately. Some (like how symptoms come on in cold weather) I haven’t figured out yet. But the other night I think I overcame one annoying one, where I was previously unable to lie on my back with a blanket on top without pain, as ridiculous as that sounds—and making it sound ridiculous to my brain was the key to overcoming it! I had just kept repeating that there’s no way I could be harming myself by having a freaking blanket on top of me, and I can lie in whatever position I want. This didn’t work immediately, but after some time it seems like it’s shifted to where it’s almost nothing now.

I’m hoping this same process will happen with the other trickier conditioned responses (none of which actually make sense when I think about them).

 

I’m making a lot of progress breaking my conditioned responses to horror stories by purposely leaving the forums full of horror stories about my symptoms that I used to sit on all day reading. I also made a rule for myself that if I’m going to go on forums it’s now ONLY to read success stories. After doing that, I realized that if someone on one of those forums says the words “impossible” or “you will never” it’s usually your cue to scroll right past them because they’re most likely just another person as frustrated and scared as you are, not a doctor or psychic. They’re just voicing their own feelings not predicting the future lol

 

Completely deviating from the question at hand, but my quality of life has improved exponentially since I stopped scrolling through the more negative online spaces. There has definitely been some change cognitively and emotionally. If you were constantly coming across posts and comments slamming TMS treatment, it'll take a lot of work to undo all the fear and scepticism those posts reinforced. I'm in this spot now.

 

Actually I was really lucky the first time I heard about TMS was from a person in real life (my therapist) supporting it and encouraging me to check it out. That first impression was everything imo.

My problem is that I started out by dr. Googling everything about my symptoms and spending all day on discussion forums for people with those same symptoms. So all day every day, for about 4 months, I was absorbing the same messages from those ppl over and over: “don’t try to get better, you’ll end up making yourself worse”, “the only treatment for XYZ is avoidance” etc, a lot of scared ppl catastrophizing, lots of ppl using the phrases “impossible” and “will never”, a lot of ppl giving their opinion and treating it like it’s a fact and lots of ppl crying that they think their life is over.

Then finally I decided to get off the forums and DID feel significantly better, but the impact had already been made in my mind. So when I have any “pushback” in my mind against accepting the idea of TMS it’s my brain going back to those forums and all the negativity I read there. I’m 100% sure if you went to ANY of those places and tried to advocate for TMS you’d either get bashed and downvoted by literally everyone and/or thrown out/banned immediately. Even when someone has a success story there, they just get tons and tons of negative comments about how they must not have really been “that bad” after all

 

I'm still working on that. I finally got forced into not running by a possible stress fracture so I'm going to work on easing my way back into it and handling those responses of more pain after.