Some people who experience the onset of hypothyroid or hyperthyroid disorders find difficulty coping with a health disorder that in most cases requires lifelong treatment. A degree of change in one’s ability to carry on with the same level of activities can diminish, causing a thyroid patient to feel disabled to some degree. These type changes can affect a patient emotionally, possibly requiring therapy to help them cope.
Administered Therapies and Self-Therapy
One aspect of emotional therapy that can help patients cope with thyroid disease is one in the “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” (CBT) category in which patients learn to react differently to changes thyroid symptoms may cause in their lives. Rather than reacting negatively a patient can learn instead, to react with acceptance for something they have no power to change.
Thyroid disease treatments can help tremendously with relief of hormone-imbalance related symptoms but in most cases do not take away certain disease aspects and for some patients a need for coping therapies may arise. Therapy can be administered by mental health professionals in serious cases of emotional coping needs or as self-therapy in patients who have mild to moderate coping needs.
Changes That May Require Emotional Coping
While the general symptoms of thyroid disorders are not always significantly life-changing, others are more severe and can have an emotional impact on patients in a number of ways. Women for example who develop thyroid autoimmunity, are sometimes required to delay pregnancies if they have highly elevated auto-antibody levels and some experience miscarriages due to this problem with autoimmunity. Other thyroid patients develop Thyroid Eye Disease, in which their eyes bulge and protrude and they can remain in this condition for several years. Others experience significant hair loss or emotional symptoms that can be difficult to resolve and all of these scenarios can be difficult for affected patients to cope with in some cases.
Struggle Increases Stress
The “acceptance” aspect of learning to cope with thyroid disease is similar in-principle to CBT anxiety disorder therapies that teach anxiety sufferers not to struggle with anxiety but to simply learn to flow with it and allow it to take place. In the case of anxiety, continually struggling against symptoms simply fuels them because the “fight or flight” anxiety mechanism thrives on struggle, which serves to repeatedly reactivate them.
The same can be said of patients who struggle against a disease they have no control over, rather than learning to accept it as having become a part of their lives. This type acceptance in the case of a thyroid patient does not mean that he welcomes the disease or approves of it but simply means he accepts the fact that it has entered his life and will remain there unless cured or healed by divine intervention. By strongly resisting a disease with ongoing mental and physical struggle, a patient can actually increase symptoms of stress, anxiety and fatigue.
Giving One’s Self Permission to Feel Unwell
A thyroid patient must give himself permission to feel sick if symptoms flare and permission to take extra time to rest and relax. This might also require upfront honesty with friends and relatives who ask for his attendance at events he may not feel able to attend. Simply being honest and saying that the timing is not good for him can help relieve the stress of expectations.
In most cases people are understanding when you explain your reasons to them while others may not be. Regardless, health and wellbeing must always come before pleasing others and a thyroid patient cannot afford to add unnecessary stressors to his life. This same advice can be applied to patients suffering illnesses such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia.
Medical studies have shown that chronic stress can directly affect thyroid disease severity. In addition to the described CBT coping methods, there are other psychiatric therapies that can help emotionally struggling thyroid patients, as well as medications that can be prescribed by their doctors.
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