Category: Health

Health, MS, chronic illness, healing

Compound Healing: How Small Daily Habits Multiply Your Health

Amanda, walkamyelinmyshoes

I was on my morning walk yesterday, headphones in, half-listening to a financial podcast, something I never imagined myself doing. But here we are. When you find yourself single after thirty years, you do a lot of things you never imagined.

The podcast was by investing ninja Kristen Wonch, and she was explaining compound interest using the most relatable analogy I’ve ever heard: a rumour in high school.

Picture it. One person whispers something deliciously scandalous to two people. Those two people each tell two more. And so on and so on. After just 20 days? Two million people know that story.

But here’s where it gets wild. If that first person had told just three people instead of two, and each of those people told three, and so on, after 20 days, the number doesn’t climb to three million. It doesn’t even double.

It goes to 15 billion.

Let that sink in. One extra person. Compounded over time. An almost incomprehensible difference.

And that’s when it hit me. What if the thing spreading wasn’t gossip, but your healing?

When Everything Changed at Once

When my marriage ended after three decades, the fear that moved in alongside the grief wasn’t just emotional. It was financial. It was existential. It was: what does the rest of my life actually look like?

I did what I do. I researched. I listened to podcasts on my walks. I read everything I could get my hands on. And somewhere in that process of trying to figure out how to create financial stability, I started realizing that everything I was learning about financial habits applied, sometimes perfectly, to my health.

Because the truth is, both had been on autopilot for a long time. And autopilot, as it turns out, is not a strategy.

Tiny Habits Are Compound Interest for Your Health

I used to ask myself, in the slightly sarcastic voice I reserve for things I suspect are too good to be true: How much difference can it actually make to spend five minutes outside first thing in the morning? What does five minutes of meditation really do?

The answer, it turns out, is an insurmountable difference. Just not overnight.

Unlike the rumour mill, which spreads fast and furious and usually ends in someone crying in a bathroom, the compounding of healthy habits happens slowly. Quietly. Through tiny shifts that you almost don’t notice until one day you do.

A five-minute walk becomes a twenty-minute walk. The morning air clears your head enough that you sleep better. You sleep better so you have a little more energy. A little more energy means you feel like cooking instead of ordering in. Better food means your body feels different. Your body feeling different means you actually want to move it. And on it goes.

Each habit creates the conditions for the next one. That’s the flywheel. That’s the compound interest. The return on investment isn’t obvious at first, but it’s absolutely, undeniably real.

The Titanic and the 1% Shift

I’ve been thinking about the Titanic a lot lately. Bear with me.

That ship did not sink because of the iceberg, exactly. It sank because by the time the iceberg was a problem, the ship was already committed to its course. I’m speculating here, obviously, but I imagine the thinking was something like: well, this thing is too massive to turn, so let’s just keep going and hope for the best.

We all know how that ended.

But what if the captain had started a 1% course correction the moment he first heard about the ice? What if the adjustment had been small enough to feel almost pointless, but consistent, and early?

The tragedy might have been entirely averted.

We’re all captains of our own ships. And most of us, at some point, have had an iceberg on the horizon that we kept sailing toward because change felt too big, too slow, too hard to bother with. I’ll start Monday. I’ll start in January. I’ll start when things calm down.

The thing is, the ship’s already moving. You might as well start turning.

From Hindsight to Foresight

Here’s something I’ve made peace with recently: I wish I’d started investing in my twenties. My dad told me to. I didn’t listen. It was too complicated. I didn’t have the ‘extra’ money. All the usual excuses. Now that I understand how compound interest works, I can see exactly what that cost me.

For a while, that knowledge felt like punishment. Like proof that I had done life wrong.

But I’ve stopped doing that. Because beating yourself up about what you didn’t start ten years ago is the opposite of useful. It’s actually just another version of the Titanic problem, staying committed to a course that isn’t working because changing it feels too late.

It’s not too late. It’s never too late. And here’s the reframe that changed everything for me:

Instead of looking back at the last ten years with regret, and ‘shoulding’ all over myself, I use the power of foresight to look forward at the next ten. Where do I want to be? What does that person look like? And what’s the smallest, most manageable 1% shift I can make today to start becoming her?

True with money. True with health. Always.

Nobody Is Coming With a Life Raft

I want to say something that might sting a little, but I mean it with love.

Nobody is coming to save you.

Not a doctor who hands you a magic prescription. Not a diet that fixes everything in thirty days. Not a wellness trend, a detox, or a supplement. The life raft is not coming because you’re not drowning. You’re swimming. And you’re more capable than you’ve been led to believe.

You have a tremendous amount of control over your own health. More than the healthcare system tends to tell you. More than you might feel right now, especially if you’re in the middle of something hard. Even MS.

It doesn’t matter what habit you start with. It only matters that you do. Five minutes outside. One glass of water before your coffee. A single deep breath before you look at your phone in the morning. Something so small it almost feels silly.

Start there. Let it compound.

The Best Investment You’ll Ever Make. And It’s Free.

Financial security is important. I won’t pretend otherwise, I spent enough sleepless nights worrying about it to know that money stress is real and it’s heavy.

But there’s no better investment than your health. Not one. Because without it, nothing else works. Not the retirement fund, not the dream trip, not the relationship or the career or the creative project you keep putting off.

And my favourite part of this whole analogy? Most of the habits that change your life the most are completely, entirely free.

Sleep. Movement. Sunlight. Water. Stillness. Connection. Breathing. These are not luxuries. They’re the compound interest machine, and you already own it.

So I’ll leave you with the question I keep asking myself:

Where could you be in ten years if you add one tiny habit today?

The rumour has to start somewhere. Let it start with you.

❤️Amanda

Five minutes in nature compounds to a calm nervous system
chronic illness, gratitude, healing, Health, life, mental health, MS

Life Only Goes in One Direction 

Amanda, walkamyelinmyshoes

 When I was young, way back in the olden days, I was in such a hurry to grow up. As a tween, a phrase that didn’t even exist in the 1980s, I wanted to make my own decisions, eat lots of junk food and stay up as late as I wanted. As a 15 year old, I thought it was very adult to be going to the bar, doing tequila shots and dancing on the speakers. Yikes! The sweet absurdity of being in such a hurry to become someone older.

When my kids were little, I often reminded them that life only goes in one direction, so don’t be in a hurry to grow up. Then I was diagnosed with MS, and I found myself wanting to go back to the before: before I got sick, before my kids had to worry about having a sick mother, before I had to give up my job. I was wishing for a time machine when that phrase popped back into my head. Talk about irony.

It was from my experience as a misguided youth that I gained the wisdom to pass that phrase on to my children, to encourage them to slow down and not wish away their childhood. Yet, there I was, newly diagnosed, desperately wishing there was a rewind button for life. How easy it is to dispense retrospective wisdom, not knowing how much you’ll need it one day yourself.

With the diagnosis, everything I thought I knew about moving forward got turned inside out. MS took not just my health, but the sweet oblivion of how precarious health can be. The luxury of not constantly thinking and worrying about my body. The career I loved, teaching 6 year olds to read, count and sing in French. The before and after line that changed everything and left me with the desperate, completely human wish to go backwards.

When the phrase popped back into my head, at first it felt cruel, like a mockery of the bleak future promised by the neurologist. Life only goes in direction. The doors to reclaim my health locked from the other side. The crushing grief of accepting there is no before to return to.

It took years to move through that resistance to something like peace. I’d hear people say “my illness has been a blessing’, and think they were completely unhinged. Slowly, reluctantly, I started to understand what they meant. There’s a clarity that comes from being forced to stop. From learning to be a human being instead of a human doing. 

The brutal, beautiful truth is that suffering is one of life’s most effective teachers. The things that MS has given me that nothing else could: presence, gratitude and a recalibrated sense of what matters. Not a silver lining so much as a different kind of light.

Something you can try this week: Spend five minutes with the “before”. Let yourself miss it and feel the grief. Then consciously close that door and ask, “what is available to me today?” You don’t have to feel grateful yet, just curious.

❤️ Amanda

” A tree doesn’t regret losing its leaves because it knows it’s time to shed them for a new, beautiful life.”

chronic illness, healing, Health, mental health, MS

The 6 Words That Became My Prison

Amanda, walkamyelinmyshoes

‘I’ll never be the same again.’ I said those six words three weeks after my MS diagnosis, not knowing I was building a prison.

The moment I first said those words, I was trying to feel excited about all the growth in my garden. Instead, I was terrified and overwhelmed with all the work that growth was making for me. 

My body felt like I’d been squeezed through a pasta maker and dragged behind a pickup. I couldn’t find the energetic, motivated person I’d always thought myself to be. (I’d actually always struggled with fatigue but I had a close personal relationship with Denial.)

I repeated variations of that sentence daily for 3 years, swirling in the fog of confusion and grief a life-changing diagnosis brings.

Saying ‘I have MS’ is just a fact. But it’s the way I said it, with defeat, with finality, like it was my entire identity. That’s what kept me stuck. There’s a difference between ‘I have MS’ and ‘I AM sick.’


Your brain builds neural pathways like garden paths. The thoughts you repeat are the ones you “walk” most often. Over time, those paths become smooth and automatic. For better or for worse.

Because your brain’s job is to keep you safe, it takes your repeated thoughts as truth, so whatever you tell it often enough, it starts to believe and look for proof.

When you start choosing new, healing thoughts, you’re simply walking a new path. With practice, your brain learns to follow it naturally.

One morning I woke up thinking ‘I don’t think I can get out of bed today.’ So I didn’t. I spent 14 hours scrolling my iPad, feeling like a burden, spiraling into anxiety about the future. The next morning, before my brain could start its doom loop, I thought ‘What’s one small thing I can do?’ I watered the plants. That was it. But I wasn’t in bed all day.

When I worried that people thought I was faking because I could walk, or that I wasn’t ‘sick enough’ to be on disability, the vertigo would kick in and my ears would ring. Not exactly at that moment, it took some reflection to realize the connection, but the symptoms weren’t just random examples of my body betraying me. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in action.

Staring at my garden one day, trying to squash the overwhelm at the weeding and pruning calling to me through the fatigue, I watched the hummingbirds flit from one buddleia to another. I envied their boundless energy and wished I could breathe it in.

Then I wondered what it would be like to be an animal and not have the overthinking, negative-biased human brain. That flipped the switch, and I thought, “What if I shift my perspective?” 

Adjusting the lens of how I looked at things, from “I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired” to “What can I do to help myself heal?” was the game-changing move that stopped the carousel of terror and started a true healing path.

These days, when I catch myself thinking ‘I’ll never…’, I pause. Sometimes I can shift it immediately: ‘Not never. Just not today.’ Sometimes I can’t, and that’s okay too.

That garden I was standing in when I first said those six words? I learned to tend it in a different way. Some days with energy, some days from a chair, sometimes just watching the hummingbirds from the window. But I was no longer terrified of the growth, because I was part of it.

The prison was never MS. It was the story I told myself about MS. And I’m the one who holds the key.

What six words have you been saying to yourself? Write them down. Just notice them. That’s where the door starts to open.

❤️Amanda

What path are you creating with your thoughts?
Get Your free MS mindset reset Guide
chronic illness, gratitude, Health, life, mental health, MS

From Chaos to Calm: Your 3-Minute Reset After MS Diagnosis (or anytime)

Amanda, walkamyelinmyshoes

Everything just changed. Your mind is spinning.

You want relief. You want answers. You want to feel better now.

After the relief of finally getting my diagnosis, an answer to my 23-year medical mystery tour, the overwhelm took over. My first neurologist handed me the stack of medication information and told me to pick one. Yeah, I fired him.

I didn’t know where to start. So I did what most of us do. I looked for answers everywhere else.

There’s so much information out there. Diets. Protocols. Supplements. Exercise routines. Many people claim to have the one “best” way to handle your life-changing diagnosis.

But here’s what I learned. You’re the only one who can decide what your healing journey looks like. And when you’re caught in a storm of information and emotion, you can’t hear your own wisdom. You need to find ground first.

MS can make you feel powerless. But creating calm, even for three minutes, is something you can do right now.

Here’s your reset:

Set a 3-minute timer.

Place one hand on your heart, the other on your belly.

Take slow breaths into your belly, the way a baby breathes. The way humans breathe naturally before stress teaches us to hold our breath in our chest.

Close your eyes or look at the sky.

Notice one thing you’re grateful for or hopeful about.

That’s it. Do this once today. Nothing more.

This isn’t about fixing everything. It’s about giving your nervous system permission to settle. Because healing can’t happen in chaos.

Do you have a quick reset to share? Let me know in the comments.

I see you. You’ve got this.

❤️ Amanda

Mindset shift: Chaos to calm.
Take 3 minutes to breathe and stare at the sky.
Get Your free MS mindset reset Guide

chronic illness, Health, life, mental health, MS

Exercise, the DIY DMT

Amanda, walkamyelinmyshoes

It’s been a long six and a half years since my MS diagnosis, seven since the relapse that made teaching impossible, but I’ve healed more than I thought possible back in 2015.

I attribute my healing to various things, namely a healthy, stress-free lifestyle, low-dose Naltrexone (LDN), a healthy, mostly vegan diet, circadian fasting (more on that later), time in nature and in my garden, and a great dose of luck that this monster isn’t as aggressive for me as it is for some people.

The biggest factor in the last year though, has been exercise. I thought they were lying. When you barely have enough energy to breathe, how can you possibly exercise? Or, when you do have the energy, you go as hard as the ‘old you’ could manage, then end up in bed for days, useless as braces on a duck.

Much nicer with no braces.
Photo by Skyler Ewing on Pexels.com

So I decided I needed to be methodical about it, and make a commitment to myself to spend half an hour a day using it before I lose it. Never mind MS, age starts gnawing away at the natural strength you used to take for granted and it’s a slippery slope. If I can binge watch Survivor at the end of the day, surely I can carve out half an hour for exercise.

Remember the movie About A Boy? Hugh Grant’s character was a rich layabout who organized his days in thirty minute increments. It became wisdom to me when I was first on disability, and now at least one of those thirty minute chunks is devoted to exercise.

If the weather permits, my exercise is walking outside because it also checks off another important part of my morning routine which is at least 30 minutes of sunlight (or a reasonable facsimile thereof-gray skies are still beautiful). I’m all about efficiency!

Otherwise, I either ride the recumbent bike or do yoga or pilates on YouTube. There are some amazing channels out there, I’ll link a few favourites at the bottom. The trick is, pick the beginner videos. You have nothing to prove except a commitment to consistency.

I know, I know, you used to be able to handle intermediate or advanced, but remember the braces on a duck? While incongruous, it speaks nothing to the true pain you can cause yourself by trying to do too much too fast. Maybe we should picture a tortoise with a headband instead. Since I’ve been limiting myself to gentle but CONSISTENT exercise, I have finally been able to maintain an exercise routine and start to see and feel the benefits.

the tortoise→ MS Warrior

the hand → MS

The tortoise might be caught but he never stops moving!

My newer, all-time favourite paid exercise program, that I do two or three times a week because it always leaves me with a smile on my face, is BodyGroove. With catch phrases like “you can’t do it wrong” and “do whatever feels good for your body”, they have turned exercise into a fun way to connect with your body and dance like it’s 1988.

For each song, they introduce three different rhythms that are simple enough for you to interpret however you want but sooo good for your cognitive health. Check out these articles for all the benefits dance provides.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Is-Dancing-Good-for-the-Brain.aspx https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014976341830664X

I’m not affiliated in anyway, I just think it’s a great program for anyone chronically ill, as they have all sorts of people demonstrating and showing how much you can do even sitting down. You don’t need any experience but I grew up dancing in a fairly serious way so I love that I can reconnect with that previous iteration of myself, even on days when the MonSter makes my movements sluggish and difficult.

On my darkest days, stuck in my bed, I dance in my head like I used to as a child. With strength, freedom and passion. Now, even on my mediocre days, I can push myself to do it because “you can’t do it wrong”. You need to move your body, so why not groove your body?

It was my oft-mentioned, well-respected naturopath, Dr Pamela Hutchinson that gave me the idea for the title of this post. Dr Pam believes that exercise should be considered a DMT(disease-modifying therapy), and my neurologist agrees that exercise is the single most important thing you can do to fight MS.

They’re not lying. Move your body, but gently. If you can’t commit to half an hour, commit to five minutes and build up from there. The important thing is to get or keep moving so we don’t lose any more of the mobility and strength that we still have. Fight the fight. You got this!

Top 5 exercises for the chronic illness warrior

  1. Walk – in nature or at least outside
  2. Yoga – Jessica Richburg https://youtu.be/zA5oxYvIx0c – Yoga with Kassandra https://youtu.be/6hZIzMpHl-c – Yoga with Adrienne https://youtu.be/v7AYKMP6rOE
  3. Pilates – Move with Nicole https://youtu.be/NyP_waVgL1w
  4. Recumbent bike – with a nature meditation video https://youtu.be/tck7E11SdR8
  5. Body Groove https://www.bodygroove.com

Amanda ❤️