Make Visible: Understanding Complex Illness

#10 Staying connected (Part 2): Dealing with isolation and limitations in complex illness with Suzy Bolt

Feb 11, 2025

In this insightful conversation, Suzy Bolt, a Long Covid warrior turned community builder, shares her journey of creating the Rest, Repair, Recover program. She discusses the importance of self-compassion, creativity, and nutrition in managing complex illnesses. Suzy highlights how small, positive changes can significantly impact health and well-being. Through shared experiences and community support, she emphasizes the transformative power of connection and joy in healing, proving that together we can navigate even the toughest journeys.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Illness Sparks Self-Awareness

Complex illness offers a chance for deep self-awareness that many never get to explore.
Reflection on personality and self-kindness emerges uniquely through health challenges.

ADVICE

Practice Loving Kindness to Self

Treat your body with loving kindness, as you would a dear friend.
Shift negative self-talk to foster healing and nurture your nervous system.

ANECDOTE

Creativity as Healing Outlet

Suzy integrated art, poetry, gardening, and music into her program to reignite clients' creativity.
These activities offer distraction from symptoms and create community connection.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

When Suzy Bolt developed Long Covid in 2020 she searched for ways to understand her condition and began to create an online community of like-minded people traversing similar health situations. From her dark bedroom she found many others looking for answers, validation and ideas to help them navigate their illnesses, and from this she started to develop her holistic program.

Drawing on her background in counselling, yoga and neuro-linguistic programming - alongside her own experience of illness - Suzy launched an online platform in September 2020 to help people with post-viral and energy-limiting conditions. Her Rest, Repair, Recover program provides a space for support, community, and a deeper understanding of the nervous system.

The program brings together practitioners with lived experience of these conditions, offering an interactive framework of movement, breathwork, creativity, and rest - all aimed at regulating the autonomic nervous system.

In this two-part conversation, Bolt explores the cascade effect of small, positive changes—finding joy, building community, and practicing self-compassion—and how these shifts can influence the nervous system, immune function, and overall well-being.

In this, the second part of the conversation, we discuss the kindness, creativity and distraction from symptoms; along with nutrition, celebrating progress and the effect that these programmes have had on people’s lives.

Over the past five years Suzy Bolt has become a mainstay for those looking to improve their condition through a holistic approach. In a recent survey of those who have attended her programmes, the majority said that it improved their overall energy levels, improved their mood, alleviated some of their medical concerns and gave people confidence to manage their symptoms. She is regularly consulted and recommended by the NHS as an additional strand to medical help that people may be being offered.

Her approach endeavours to address autonomic dysfunction as a way to create optimum environment in which people can start to feel improvements in their health.

Make Visible

@visible_health

@visible.health