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Stop Being Your Symptoms and Start Being Yourself: The 6-Week Mind-Body Program to Ease Your Chronic Symptoms
Do you suffer from ongoing pain or other chronic medical symptoms such as fatigue, lower back pain, arthritis, acid indigestion, insomnia, or migraines? Do they interfere with your family time or your work? Have you been forced to give up activities that you enjoy? Do you feel as though your symptoms are taking over your life? Thirty percent of the population suffer from chronic debilitating illnesses and pain that respond only partially to conventional medicine. But this doesn't mean that there is no relief in sight. Dr. Arthur Barsky, psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine, has found that changing the way you think about your illness can have a remarkable effect on how you experience your symptoms. Two people with the same symptoms can live dramatically different lives because they think about and react to their symptoms differently. At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Barsky developed "Stop Being Your Symptoms and Start Being Yourself," a breakthrough six-week program designed to overcome the symptoms of chronic illnesses of every kind. Based on more than twenty years of firsthand clinical experience, his scientifically tested treatment plan is unique, powerful, and simple to learn. This groundbreaking program teaches patients to master the five psychological factors that make chronic symptoms persist through hundreds of exercises, worksheets, and patient examples. You may not be able to completely eliminate your medical symptoms. But it is possible to control your symptoms rather than letting them control you—to manage your pain, fatigue, insomnia, and anxiety. You can minimize your symptoms, learn new coping skills, and do more to make sure that your symptoms are not robbing your life of meaning and pleasure. Stop being your symptoms—and start living the life you deserve.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 2006
22 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 16, 2024
A really solid read. A productive and direct means of addressing health anxiety and hypochondria, as well as non-judgmentally connecting it with chronic conditions and emphasizing the role of the mind, framing, and stress management.
I think the best part was early on, when he laid medicine bare: A doctor doesn't give a shit if it's not cancer, heart disease, or infection. If you come in with symptoms and it's not one of those immediate emergencies, you are moved to the back burner and dealt with eventually, unless you get impatient and leave. And if you can leave, then hey! Looks like they were right.
He goes on to say that symptoms =/= conditions. You can have a condition or a disease without having any symptoms, as in the case of the 30% of people with bulged or herniated disks who experience no back pain whatsoever, and never would've found out about the issues in their spine if they hadn't stumbled on it during routine checkups or looking at something else.
And you can have symptoms without a condition. This is huge. Sometimes, you just have symptoms. Sometimes you have a runny nose and it's because you have a runny nose. Sometimes, things bleed for no reason. If you ask WebMD, that's boneworms, that's gooch cancer, you're cooked dude. You've got 2 weeks to live. If you ask a real doctor, they say, "Huh! Weird! Well, sometimes there's blood! You know how it is, containing blood."
We vastly overestimate the capacity of medical professionals. Medicine is an idiot science. Barbers were bleeding people until the mid 1920s. All the medicine you know of today is around a century old, and there haven't been all that many huge advances in it outside of antibiotics and the polio vaccine. That doesn't apply to most other vaccines, lest we forget.
Doctors are trained as interventionists. You come to them, and they give you pills, or they do some cutting. That's what they're for. If you bring them a problem that does not involve pills or cutting, the doctors are going to say, "Huh! Weird!" And probably recommend you see a psychiatrist.
And as fucked as it is, they're still usually right, because you literally cannot conceive of how many psychogenic symptoms a body can engineer. Anxiety alone, you're looking at tachycardia, brain fog, musculoskeletal malfunction, nausea, vomiting, indigestion, constipation, sweating, dry heaves, nutrient malabsorption, insomnia, panic attacks, seizures. Full on seizures. You live like that for a few weeks and the body gets run down, things can start to fail. You have vitamin deficiencies, fainting spells, psychosis. And pain. Pain everywhere, worse and worse.
And the truly insidious part is, you can get these things by worrying that you'll get these things. No physical cause to it, but one hell of a physical effect.
On a long enough timeline, it can kill. I worked with a hypochondriac who wound up dying from it. A psychotherapist, ironically enough. She had been self-medicating with over the counter stomach medication because her "doctors didn't listen to her" when she came in complaining of constant tummy troubles. The medicines she took and the quantity she took them in, in conjunction with stress-induced GERD, chewed a hole in her stomach lining. She didn't notice the difference since her stomach always hurt, and on the day she died she refused to go to the hospital because "I don't have health insurance and I'm not going to pay out of pocket for them to do nothing".
Chilling last words, in retrospect.
Health anxiety is not having anything wrong, but believing something is wrong so hard that something becomes wrong. This is vindicating for the victim, because when something is finally wrong, they get to yell, "I told you I was sick!"
And, sure, they were, after a fashion. That's what makes this book so important. This six-week method reduces the severity of the health anxiety. It lets these people back off their identification with their constant parade of pain and misery, it unclots the offices of various medical specialists (who have just been charging their insurance and shrugging at them anyway), and it allows them to be accountable for administering their own reality check, so there isn't the defensive doubling-down on how sick they truly were all along.
My mother died of cancer. They gave her weeks, and she made it decades. She beat it twice. The chemo always beat her up worse than the disease itself, but right to the end, she maintained optimism and a fairly high quality of life. A disease doesn't guarantee symptoms, symptoms don't guarantee a disease, and neither dictate an individual's response. If you wallow about your symptoms, whether there's a disease underlying them or not, they will become worse, and you will become more miserable.
So put in your six weeks. Do the work and take back your life.
Favorite quote:
"There is a great paradox inherent in overcoming our symptoms: In order to cope successfully with them, we must first acknowledge that we are stuck with them. To put it simply, you don't learn to cope with adversity until you acknowledge that you will have to. The paradox is that the very acceptance of this plight opens the door to improving it. Many gravely ill people feel better and are less impaired than healthy hypochondriacs. Why? Because they have accepted the reality of their situation, and have therefore set about making the best of it. They know nothing more is to be gained by seeking an illusory cure, and so they turn their efforts to coping with their illness, managing it, compensating for it, and overcoming it."
I think the best part was early on, when he laid medicine bare: A doctor doesn't give a shit if it's not cancer, heart disease, or infection. If you come in with symptoms and it's not one of those immediate emergencies, you are moved to the back burner and dealt with eventually, unless you get impatient and leave. And if you can leave, then hey! Looks like they were right.
He goes on to say that symptoms =/= conditions. You can have a condition or a disease without having any symptoms, as in the case of the 30% of people with bulged or herniated disks who experience no back pain whatsoever, and never would've found out about the issues in their spine if they hadn't stumbled on it during routine checkups or looking at something else.
And you can have symptoms without a condition. This is huge. Sometimes, you just have symptoms. Sometimes you have a runny nose and it's because you have a runny nose. Sometimes, things bleed for no reason. If you ask WebMD, that's boneworms, that's gooch cancer, you're cooked dude. You've got 2 weeks to live. If you ask a real doctor, they say, "Huh! Weird! Well, sometimes there's blood! You know how it is, containing blood."
We vastly overestimate the capacity of medical professionals. Medicine is an idiot science. Barbers were bleeding people until the mid 1920s. All the medicine you know of today is around a century old, and there haven't been all that many huge advances in it outside of antibiotics and the polio vaccine. That doesn't apply to most other vaccines, lest we forget.
Doctors are trained as interventionists. You come to them, and they give you pills, or they do some cutting. That's what they're for. If you bring them a problem that does not involve pills or cutting, the doctors are going to say, "Huh! Weird!" And probably recommend you see a psychiatrist.
And as fucked as it is, they're still usually right, because you literally cannot conceive of how many psychogenic symptoms a body can engineer. Anxiety alone, you're looking at tachycardia, brain fog, musculoskeletal malfunction, nausea, vomiting, indigestion, constipation, sweating, dry heaves, nutrient malabsorption, insomnia, panic attacks, seizures. Full on seizures. You live like that for a few weeks and the body gets run down, things can start to fail. You have vitamin deficiencies, fainting spells, psychosis. And pain. Pain everywhere, worse and worse.
And the truly insidious part is, you can get these things by worrying that you'll get these things. No physical cause to it, but one hell of a physical effect.
On a long enough timeline, it can kill. I worked with a hypochondriac who wound up dying from it. A psychotherapist, ironically enough. She had been self-medicating with over the counter stomach medication because her "doctors didn't listen to her" when she came in complaining of constant tummy troubles. The medicines she took and the quantity she took them in, in conjunction with stress-induced GERD, chewed a hole in her stomach lining. She didn't notice the difference since her stomach always hurt, and on the day she died she refused to go to the hospital because "I don't have health insurance and I'm not going to pay out of pocket for them to do nothing".
Chilling last words, in retrospect.
Health anxiety is not having anything wrong, but believing something is wrong so hard that something becomes wrong. This is vindicating for the victim, because when something is finally wrong, they get to yell, "I told you I was sick!"
And, sure, they were, after a fashion. That's what makes this book so important. This six-week method reduces the severity of the health anxiety. It lets these people back off their identification with their constant parade of pain and misery, it unclots the offices of various medical specialists (who have just been charging their insurance and shrugging at them anyway), and it allows them to be accountable for administering their own reality check, so there isn't the defensive doubling-down on how sick they truly were all along.
My mother died of cancer. They gave her weeks, and she made it decades. She beat it twice. The chemo always beat her up worse than the disease itself, but right to the end, she maintained optimism and a fairly high quality of life. A disease doesn't guarantee symptoms, symptoms don't guarantee a disease, and neither dictate an individual's response. If you wallow about your symptoms, whether there's a disease underlying them or not, they will become worse, and you will become more miserable.
So put in your six weeks. Do the work and take back your life.
Favorite quote:
"There is a great paradox inherent in overcoming our symptoms: In order to cope successfully with them, we must first acknowledge that we are stuck with them. To put it simply, you don't learn to cope with adversity until you acknowledge that you will have to. The paradox is that the very acceptance of this plight opens the door to improving it. Many gravely ill people feel better and are less impaired than healthy hypochondriacs. Why? Because they have accepted the reality of their situation, and have therefore set about making the best of it. They know nothing more is to be gained by seeking an illusory cure, and so they turn their efforts to coping with their illness, managing it, compensating for it, and overcoming it."
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October 4, 2022This is useful. On one hand, easy to implement. On the other hand, it's asking for a reframe and a mindset shift. I'll admit that at certain points I thought "Hey, if I follow this advice, I might really miss important life or death symptoms!!!" But he does say repeatedly he is talking about symptoms that you have thoroughly discussed with your doctor and have been given clear information that it is disturbing and painful *but not life threatening*
I really like his approach. He is eclectic in the sense that he summarizes a lot of already known good things to do. But he distills it and he's practical and he gives a variety of approaches and suggests you sift through and find the ones that work best for your individual case.
He spends time explaining the different types of thought patterns that we fall into that make us pay more attention to our symptoms and that make our symptoms more painful. I particularly liked his explanation of what anxiety, depression, and anger does to our bodies PHYSICALLY that a) causes symptoms that are similar to serious symptoms, sending us into a spiral of more worry and more symptoms and b) actually physically causes more pain.
I recommend it for anyone dealing with chronic pain or chronic illness. Some of his examples and stories may be offputting and I do think it's difficult to shift mindset but some things he says just make so much good sense that even if you walk away not planning to implement it, some of it will probably stick and make a difference. And following the 6 week program conscientiously will, I think, make a big difference.
I really like his approach. He is eclectic in the sense that he summarizes a lot of already known good things to do. But he distills it and he's practical and he gives a variety of approaches and suggests you sift through and find the ones that work best for your individual case.
He spends time explaining the different types of thought patterns that we fall into that make us pay more attention to our symptoms and that make our symptoms more painful. I particularly liked his explanation of what anxiety, depression, and anger does to our bodies PHYSICALLY that a) causes symptoms that are similar to serious symptoms, sending us into a spiral of more worry and more symptoms and b) actually physically causes more pain.
I recommend it for anyone dealing with chronic pain or chronic illness. Some of his examples and stories may be offputting and I do think it's difficult to shift mindset but some things he says just make so much good sense that even if you walk away not planning to implement it, some of it will probably stick and make a difference. And following the 6 week program conscientiously will, I think, make a big difference.
September 19, 2014
Good book for clients who have chronic medical symptoms. Includes relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, changing health behaviors (starting or resuming activities that pose no threat to health and eliminating behaviors that perpetuate symptoms), managing moods, and coping/problem-solving.
p. 19 Symptoms can be produced by more things than physical disease; they can be produced by our life experiences, expectations, beliefs, and emotions.
p. 19 Symptoms can be produced by more things than physical disease; they can be produced by our life experiences, expectations, beliefs, and emotions.
May 3, 2018
Good book to realize the impact our mindset has on our symptoms. By changing the way we think and respond to symptoms, we can change the impact they have on our lives. "The amount of attention we pay to symptoms influences how intense symptoms feel." Things like distracting yourself with activities and relaxation techniques can make a difference. These can give back control over things that seem uncontrollable.
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November 6, 2025Skimmed. It's aimed at hypochondriacs, but I think trying to market itself so that people who don't think they are hypochondriacs (but really are) will read it.
May 5, 2017
Good introductory content
If you've never read a thing about coping with chronic illness, this book introduces all of the pertinent concepts. It goes over the common ways people think about illness and make it worse, without even knowing that they do.
If you've never read a thing about coping with chronic illness, this book introduces all of the pertinent concepts. It goes over the common ways people think about illness and make it worse, without even knowing that they do.
October 20, 2010
How life and health issues affect us is linked to our mental attitudes.
This book makes entirely good sense derived from a 6 week program helping people struggling with anxiety and symptoms. We worry and become anxious and things get worse or at least we feel things get worse and we get stuck in loops which intesify and strangle us. The authors assert "Our primary goal should be living successfully, not striving for perfect physical health...If we find more meaning in our work and our relationships, experience a fuller emotional and spiritual life, derive pleasure from play and from our pastimes, then we are better prepared to deal with ill health." Strangely reminiscent of the assertions I read in The Secrets of a Bulletproof Spirit.
"...people cope better with illnesses and lessen their symptoms when they realize that good health is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Physical well-being is not an adequate substitute for a gratifying, complete, and rewarding life."
This book makes entirely good sense derived from a 6 week program helping people struggling with anxiety and symptoms. We worry and become anxious and things get worse or at least we feel things get worse and we get stuck in loops which intesify and strangle us. The authors assert "Our primary goal should be living successfully, not striving for perfect physical health...If we find more meaning in our work and our relationships, experience a fuller emotional and spiritual life, derive pleasure from play and from our pastimes, then we are better prepared to deal with ill health." Strangely reminiscent of the assertions I read in The Secrets of a Bulletproof Spirit.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews