Self-Health Andragogy: Self-Directed Learning Approach to Mental and Physical Self-Care

By Christopher W Pierce

After years of researching practical solutions to the physical and mental problems and injuries he sustained during his 28 years of military service, author Christopher W. Pierce shares these solutions in Self-Health Andragogy: Self-Directed Learning Approach

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041737

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

---

Every one of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.

—Princess Diana

It was the fall of 2016. I was working in Kuwait as an Army strategic engineer planner for the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve—the organization established to degrade and destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. During this time, I went to the aid station to find out why I was grinding my teeth, snoring, had shortness of breath, headaches, and daytime fatigue. At the time, I had no idea the cause of these symptoms, relying solely on advice from the medical provider. My doctor ordered some blood work then referred me to a mental health specialist, placing zero emphasis on my quality of sleep. The mental health provider diagnosed me with generalized anxiety, started me on anti-depressants, treated me with cognitive-behavioral therapy, and failed to screen for a sleep disorder.

Three years later, my symptoms became worse; the medication failed to provide relief and created new issues. In 2017, during two different parachute training incidents, I suffered traumatic brain injuries, adding more mental and physical problems. The root cause for the symptoms I presented in 2016 was finally discovered when the medical provider treating the brain injuries ordered a sleep study. I had moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). By then, it was too late. The prolonged undiagnosed OSA had caused various health issues, including a problem with my heart requiring surgery. After my heart procedure at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, I recall asking the doctor if I would recover in time to run a marathon in three months. I’m sorry, he said. I recommend you cease running marathons. Elevating your heart rate for such a prolonged duration when running a marathon could cause additional complications.

I was devastated. I had a lifelong goal of running fifty marathons before I reached the age of fifty. The undiagnosed OSA greatly influenced my quality of life and sense of wellbeing. The wear and tear of twenty-seven years of military service combined with mental and physical injuries and illnesses began to lessen my quality of life. I asked myself, Is this what old age is like? Is there nothing I could have done to have avoided these problems? Do I have the potential to assume a self-reliant approach toward my health and wellness that doesn’t solely rely on treatment from a medical provider? Can I take a larger role in my health and wellness? The answer is, Yes, I can, and so can you. And this book will empower you to do so.

My frustration with how long it took my medical providers to uncover my issues, combined with my curiosity to understand what was happening in my mind and body, influenced this new passion and path that I’m on now. I desired to find the root cause of my issues. I began to research, reflect, and make sense toward developing my self-care plan. As I learned more about the human body, I started taking a self-reliant approach toward my health and wellness.

I focused my research on sleep medicine, the biology of the brain under stress, suicide, PTSD, anxiety, and injury. I researched chronic pain and the role of nutrition, medications, and supplements. Hearing about friends and coworkers ending their lives by suicide has become routine. Additionally, I continue to lose friends early due to health issues that could have been resolved through simple life changes. My own experiences combined with the trauma of those around me fuels my passion for seeking change and empowering everyone to develop a self-health approach to their health and wellness.

This book contains four years of research, personal application, and lessons learned from others who have developed their self-health approaches. In this book, we dive deep into the area of sleep and provide you with a basic understanding of the role of sleep. You will learn about a term called cognitive dominance, which is the ability to regulate emotions and deal with stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and suicide. We also dive into chronic pain and discuss recent innovative approaches in neuroscience where you can learn to rewrite the signals in the brain that influence chronic pain. Finally, you will learn about nutrition and the efficient use of medications and supplements.

We all must take a more active role in our health and wellness. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Aging Research explains that we all can optimize opportunities to improve our health and wellness. Those who take more of a self-directed approach reported a higher sense of wellbeing (Halaweh et al, 2018). By recognizing this potential, one can begin to endure the aging process in a more healthy, joyful manner, contributing to society until the end of their life. This book is different from most self-help books. I don’t just teach you what to learn; I teach you how to learn and empower you to develop a self-directed learning approach tailored to improve your overall health and wellness and increase human performance.

I call this approach Self-Health Andragogy. Self-Health Andragogy teaches you how to uncover your self-health potential and develop your self-health strategy by implementing simple small changes. According to adult learning theorist Malcolm Knowles, andragogy is the art and science of empowering the adult learner to take a self-directed approach toward learning (Delahaye, Limerick, and Hearn, 1994). Andragogy shifts from the concept of passive learning to more self-directed learning, where the learner applies life’s experiences and recently gained knowledge to develop innovative solutions to solve their problems. Self-Health Andragogy empowers you to take the basic understanding of health and wellness, make sense of what matters the most to you personally, learn why it’s essential, and develop emotionally driven approaches that will best improve your quality of life.

The Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health found in a 2018 study that 30 percent of emergency room visits are non-urgent and could have been addressed with simple home remedies (Alele et al, 2018). Creating more self-reliance toward your health will not only significantly increase your longevity but decrease the strain of an overburdened medical system. Self-Health Andragogy teaches you to become more in tune with your body and learn how to apply self-health methods at home. This book aims to empower readers to develop their self-health approach, influencing a positive change that increases joy, happiness, and a holistic sense of wellbeing. What is one of the most significant difficulties you are facing now? How is this impacting your quality of life? Write these thoughts down as you read and reflect on them.

Throughout this book, I share stories of others who have suffered mental and physical difficulties and have found growth through a self-health approach. I will challenge you to apply the tools I share and ask you to reflect, become self-aware of your body, and determine if the tips create a positive change. Through self-reflection, you can uncover the approaches that work best for you. Chapter 2 teaches the role of reflective journaling in developing your self-health strategy and how it’s applied. You will learn about this and other systems and how to regulate reactions, reducing physiological responses that influence stress, anxiety, depression, pain, and nausea. By the end of this book, I promise you will feel like you have superhuman abilities when you can regulate these responses.

Through the simple, small changes taught in this book, you will increase your health and wellness, improving your longevity. Would you rather live your last thirty years of life happy, pain-free, and free of chronic stress? Or would you rather be miserable your last thirty years of life? Sure, you may still live to ninety or more years, but it may feel like you spend your last few years dying a slow death. Through Self-Health Andragogy, you can take control of your health and wellness, drastically improving your mental and physical quality of life. We all possess the potential and available resources; they just require commitment and persistence. It’s time to unlock them and begin your journey to a more joyful life.

PART 1

SELF-DIRECTED CARE

---

CHAPTER 1

WHY WE NEED SELF-HEALTH ANDRAGOGY

---

Plan for what is difficult while it is easy; do what is great while it is small.

—Sun Tzu

On November 27, 2018, members of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, departed their outpost in a vehicle convoy traveling toward a district in Ghazni, a city in Southeastern Afghanistan. With them traveled a group of commandos from the Afghanistan Army. Over the prior few months, this Special Forces unit had removed the Taliban’s seizure of this district and rescued over 120 Afghan civilians through very intense combat. Their convoy of vehicles traveled down a dusty road toward Ghazni with three vehicles of Afghan Commandos in the lead, followed by the vehicles carrying the Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 3126.

Suddenly the fourth vehicle, commanded by the Team Leader Captain Andrew Ross from Lexington, Virginia, exploded, throwing it in the air, creating a massive cloud of dust and black smoke. It was the biggest explosion I have ever seen in my life, explained Master Sergeant Joshua Thompson, the Team Sergeant for ODA 3126. The Taliban targeted the first American vehicle in the convoy, allowing the three Afghan commando vehicles to pass by before the insurgents pressed two batteries together, igniting a 500 pound Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The massive IED destroyed the fourth vehicle, killing the ODA Team Leader Captain Andrew Ross, Sergeant First Class Eric Emond, and Air Force Tactical Controller Staff Sergeant Dylan Elchin. Four others were wounded, and one of the four—infantryman Sergeant Jason McClary from the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division—died of his wounds five days later in Landstuhl, Germany (Rempfer, 2018).

Josh Thompson, the Team Sergeant and second in command of ODA 3126, watched from his vehicle. I was in disbelief, then as the dust settled, I quickly realized that with our team leader down, I was now in charge of the team, he explained. Josh and his team rapidly secured the area and evacuated the wounded, placing them on a Black Hawk helicopter. The scene seared graphic images and scents into the minds of Josh and his teammates as they collected the body parts of their friends and teammates and placed them and the wounded onto the helicopters. I can still see and smell this event clearly in my head. This traumatic experience was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been exposed to multiple traumatic engagements with the enemy, but this one had the greatest impact on me and continued to haunt me.

For Josh, the event on November 27, 2018, combined with sixteen years of elite military service, began to accumulate and significantly decrease his mental and physical wellbeing. It became difficult to stop constantly reliving these traumatic experiences and reintegrate into a somewhat everyday life with family and society.

Josh could find only momentary relief from his pain through alcohol consumption. I would drink a bottle right after work, then wake up early and train hard all day, then repeat the cycle. It was a constant daily cycle of chasing the end of a bottle. There were so many things competing against me that I didn’t have time to worry about what was building inside me, Josh explained. The turning point for Josh came when attending a funeral for Adam, a fellow teammate who not only experienced precisely what Josh was experiencing, but had lost the fight and chose to end his life. I saw my story and similarities between my current path and the path that Adam was on. It was at his funeral when I knew something had to change. That’s when I decided to make a positive change and seek help from a mental health professional, Josh explained.

But for Josh, his desire to change was challenged by more adversity. His next test came as he sought help from a mental health professional. During the therapy sessions, Josh did not feel comfortable with the therapist, and during his fourth session with her, she fell asleep on him. This was another moment of frustration, not only with the difficulties he was facing but frustration with the military medical system that was supposed to empower him to repair the damage created by serving one’s country.

With a strong desire to self-heal, Josh turned to his trusted friends and mentors, who could empathize with him and provide him some comfort and guidance. He found the motivation and inspiration and was determined to find a path that would enable him to live with this trauma he had experienced. A short time after my experience with the therapist who had fallen asleep on me, a friend of mine told me about an organization that provides confidential help over the phone. Josh’s friend told him about Giveanhour.org. This nonprofit organization provides twenty-four-hour confidential non-medical counseling over the phone to anyone who needs it.

This is where I began to find improvement. I could call and talk to them while driving to work, and I felt more comfortable; I was able to open up and find my relief, Josh shared. This was when he began to see hope. He began to take a self-reliant approach toward his mental health and no longer relied solely on the medical system but a community of like-minded peers and the self-application of various available self-help resources.

Many like Josh are finding relief through a self-health approach. The need to develop a self-health strategy is needed now more than ever. In this chapter, you will learn of the rising rates of chronic illness, and you will appreciate the urgency for developing self-health strategies.

In discussing suicide prevention strategies with Chris Copper, a friend, and coworker from North Carolina, he told me, We need to empower our soldiers to apply first self-aid, then buddy-aid when it comes to mental health. Chris was referring to a basic first-aid concept taught to soldiers in the military. When injured, you first take a self-health approach through self-aid, then move to buddy-aid, helping your fellow soldiers.

In his book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger emphasizes the therapeutic power of the emotional bond and a support network of unit cohesion. Sebastian explains that groups with higher levels of cohesion reported fewer psychiatric issues during World War II and Vietnam. Applying a self-health approach and relying on emotional support from like-minded peers toward mental and physical difficulties is an effective self-reliant strategy to improving wellness.

When Josh began to take a self-help approach to address his trauma from combat, he sought buddy-aid, relying on a community of peers and mentors. He continued to apply self-aid combined with a desire to discover how he could fix himself; that is