Dealing With Health Diagnoses: My Interview with Martha Beck

For an overall improvement in health and well-being, uncover the activities, people or life circumstances that make you feel physically weak or sick and eliminate them from your lives. Long-time fibromyalgia sufferer, Martha Beck, life coach and best-selling author of Finding Your Own North Star, offers this advice to anyone dealing with, or trying to prevent, a health diagnosis.

“Most of us don’t even notice that [when we’re] around certain people, certain work situations or certain places, we start to get sicker,” suggests Beck, who became aware of increased muscle pain—the hallmark symptom of fibromyalgia—under certain circumstances. Fibromyalgia’s gift to her was making these reactions so obvious. “If I do things that aren’t fun for me,” she told me, “it hurts physically.”

One of the biggest changes she made was withdrawing from the religion in which she was raised.

To listen to the rest of my Change Nation interview with Martha Beck, click here.