Understand your chronic pain and your brain. Explore alternative treatments; take control of your pain instead of chronic pain control your life.
Pain is a very personal and private experience. You may believe that no one knows or understands how you feel. You may be frustrated with treatments that don’t help. Sometimes your pain may get worse or better for reasons you don’t understand. You may feel angry, afraid, sad, even profoundly depressed, and wonder what your future may hold.
Living With Chronic Pain Can be Lonely
Chronic pain can be a very lonely experience, but you are not alone. Over 70 million Americans experience chronic pain.
Consequently, when pain is out of control, it brings more fear, enhancing our pain. It prevents us from pursuing goals, working, even enjoying our relationships. Chronic pain tends to share fear because it is unpredictable and suffering. Suffering from chronic pain has taught us to be wary.
Therefore, the more fear we hold, the more our brain and bodies work to keep us in the “fight or flight” mode. Our brain directs our focus and energy for combat or evasions against possible threats. As a result, we become hypervigilant and pay extra attention to bodily sensations. Especially we fear what activity may cause us more pain.
The more prolonged pain lasts, as with “chronic pain,” the harder it is to cope. So it’s only natural we develop negative thoughts. But unfortunately, this only worsens the pain experience and compounds our fear.
The challenge is learning how to manage your chronic pain. To feel in control instead of feeling not in control.
Learn to lead a happier, productive life even with chronic pain.
First Step:
The first step towards managing your pain is to understand how pain works.
We will start with sudden acute, short-term pain, such as back pain caused by lifting something too heavy.
This sudden pain in your back is an experience created by your brain. The pain experienced is due to a signal from your muscle up your spinal cord to your brain.
This shooting pain signal is the body’s way of telling the brain that damage has occurred or is about to happen, but the pain is a complicated experience.
Facts that are important to understand our pain.
How much a person hurts is not necessarily related to the extent of the injury, disease severity, or strength of the pain signal.
Five Illustration Of This Fact:
- In a condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia, a slight touch or even the wind on one’s face may produce severe facial pain.
- A person who is an amputee of an arm or leg may feel pain in the missing limb as if the arm or leg is still there.
- The area in the body that hurts may not even be the same injured area.
- For many with chronic pain, the pain persists long after the injury has healed.
- Under conditions of stress or emergency, even a severely injured person may feel no pain after the emergency has passed.
These examples illustrate that the pain signal doesn’t tell the whole story.
In both acute and chronic pain, the pain experience is only partly determined by the signal to the brain. Therefore, especially true with chronic pain.
In creating the sensation of pain, your brain considers other factors. These factors can magnify how severe the pain is you may be experiencing.
Let us take a look at these other factors:
Of course, the pain signal affects the pain experienced. Other factors that affect your pain are your emotions, thoughts, behavior, even other people’s responses to your pain.
You can change your experience by changing any or all of these factors.
It is important to note that medical treatment may mainly affect the pain signal. However, other therapies can influence emotions, thoughts, behavior, and social responses.
Let us go over these factual influences on your pain.
Thoughts and Emotions Affect Chronic Pain
- Emotions: Your emotions are a powerful source of information. Fear, anger, and frustration.
- Strong negative emotions suggest that something is wrong and can increase your hurt.
- In acute pain, strong emotions can be helpful information to your brain, enhancing the significance of the pain signal.
- Your brain creates a powerful pain experience that is a call to action, as with “put the heavy box down,” “take your hand off the hot stove,” “stop swinging the hammer onto your finger”
- In chronic pain, negative emotions are generally not helpful. It no longer serves as a “call to action” with acute pain.
- Worse, your brain may amplify the pain signal. Making you hurt more than you need to, as with anxiety and stress.
- Your brain also takes your thoughts about pain into account.
- “I can’t take this,” “My life is ruined,” “I am completely miserable,” “my pain is horrible,” “I can’t take it any longer”
- Self-defeating thoughts cause negative emotions. They interfere with problem-solving, may cause you to give up, and worsen the experience.
Our Behavior Affects Chronic Pain
- In creating the pain experience, your brain also considers your behavior.
- In a sense, your behavior is a type of feedback, “informing your brain” about the severity of your physical problem.
Here are some examples of behavior that “informs” your brain your physical problem must be severe.
- Asking for help for even simple tasks. Completely giving up activities you used to enjoy.
- Turning down invitations that involve even minor physical activity for the fear it will make it worse.
- Staying in bed all day.
Finally, the way family and friends respond to your pain also impacts the pain experience created in your brain.
Even though family and friends may be doing their best to help you, but can sometimes convey negative messages, such as;
- Has family and friends convey “you are a burden”
- Have they said, “you are unable to manage your life”
- Do they make it seem or tell “you need extra help”
- “you are not in control of your pain”
- When others seem to be telling you that you are weak, sick, and helpless, it makes it difficult not to feel that way.
- Your emotions, thoughts, behavior, and those around you are all accounted for by the brain. In chronic pain, the pain signal is only part of the story.
The Good News
.Your emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and relating to others can be controlled and changed.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Graded Exposure are proven therapies that psychologists and doctors use to treat patients. Patients need to assess their fear beliefs first before their brain can find the association with their pain. Then, move on to re-educating the brain to a healthier start of mind.
It may take longer for individuals with deep-seated fears to retrain the brain with a healthy mind-body connection. Nevertheless, there is hope and worth every step to put in the needed work. If our body and brain teach themselves to deal with their current state, they can learn alternative coping methods.
Our brains are neuroplastic by nature, meaning they are changeable, malleable, rewired to manage and even heal chronic pain.
There are methods you can use right now to help relieve your pain.
Mindfulness meditation, visualizations, and breathing techniques are all methods performed in the comfort of your home. Mindful practices can relieve your pain severity. Mind-body connection therapies and exercises help you take control of your pain instead of the pain controlling you. Guided meditation programs help you take control of your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors that feed your pain.
You can control and modify your pain experience by learning to control your emotions, thoughts, and behavior about your pain. Alternative therapies and practices work well along with your healthcare provider’s treatment.
More Resources:
If you would like to start a guided meditation program, Master Your Mind for Beginners is a perfect place to start. MYM sets you up for success with your meditation practice. Guided meditation with a profession at the helm helping you every step of the way. Learn to quiet your mind and let go of hounding thoughts, creating space to heal. Click the button below for more information.
The “Let Go and Let Be” Meditation program helps you let go of past emotional pain and trauma. It teaches you to let go of sticky thoughts and worries that become stuck in your mind. Thoughts and emotions that are hurting you, making you sick. The unwanted stress and anxiety make your pain experience worse. If you would like more information, click the button below.
Disclosure: Bear in mind that the links above in this post are affiliate links, and if you make a purchase, I will earn a commission at no extra cost. Keep in mind that I link this company and its products because of their quality and positive impact on people’s lives, not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is entirely up to you.
The Mind-Body Connection, What is it?
https://1111newme.com/2020/12/06/mind-body-connection-for-wellbeing/
Sources:
McClintock, A. S., McCarrick, S. M., Garland, E. L., Zaiden, F., & Zgierska, A. E. (2019). Brief Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Acute and Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.), 25(3), 265–278. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2018.0351 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6437625/
J. W. Volaeyen, and S. J. Linton, Fear-avoidance and its Consequences in Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: state of the art https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10781906/
Emily L. Zale and Joseph W. Ditre Pain-Related Fear, Disability, and the Fear-Avoidance Model of Chronic Pain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383173/