A Bristol mum went from being a high flying solicitor to a happiness consultant after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Carly Cannings said her baby girl was only six weeks old when she received the shock diagnosis.
Carly, who is in her 30s, said it all started after she and her family had spent a day out together in 2018. She said: “I started suffering from symptoms when our baby was only six weeks old. It came on very suddenly, we had been to the Balloon Festival and the next day my knees were really sore.
“I thought I had overdone it, but it became worse and worse. A chiropractor pointed me in the right direction and I went to the GP for a blood test.”
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Carly said she was shocked to be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She said: “Because it came on so quickly, it was easier to diagnose and is normally triggered by something in the immune system - which is suppressed during pregnancy.”
“It’s a chronic condition, so I have to take medication for the rest of my life to keep the symptoms under control. It made for an interesting maternity leave, I was like a 90 year old woman and my hands and wrists were so badly affected, even picking our baby up was hard.
“Those first few months with a new baby and the pain were challenging,” she said. She went back to work as a lawyer in the summer of 2019, but during Covid, Carly said: “it was that enforced slowing down with lockdown, it was a breathing space.”
She realised that if she wanted to move away from feelings of frustration and despair that she was experiencing, she needed to start looking at her condition in a different way.She said she had to “get my head around being in my mid-30s with an unpredictable disease and having to learn to live and manage it. So I did a lot of work to change my mindset.
“I realised that by becoming more curious about how my brain works, tuning in to how I was reacting to situations and learning ways to reroute my brain and move it on to a more positive track, I could gradually increase my overall happiness levels. It was like being let in on a huge secret - why had no-one taught me this stuff before.”
Carly warned that it was not a matter of weeks or months, but rather a long term commitment, which included different practices, such as writing down three things a day to be grateful about, which helps a person to scan for and recognise positives over negatives.
She said: “The process was making peace with my condition and seeing the positive. I realised I was much stronger and more resilient than I thought I could be.”
She added that getting lots of support from her husband and family, it also taught her to ask and receive help which she had found difficult before her diagnosis. She said it was also important to be able to separate perception from reality and that perception of events is the part we can control. For example being caught in a traffic jam, where the driver can choose to be either frustrated and angry, or sit back, relax and turn up the music.
Coming to terms with a lifelong disease ahead of her, sparked an interest in positive psychology and the science of happiness. Carly said she started thinking about happiness at work and the impact which happy staff have on productivity, creative thinking and analytical ability.
After three and a half years after her diagnosis, she gave up her senior leadership position at a legal insurance company to start The Happy Business School. She said: “I want businesses to see happiness as a driver of success rather than fluffy nice-to-have. It’s about more than ice-cream vans and free yoga classes. It’s about seeing the true power of happiness and the transformative effect it can have on a business and its people.”
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