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Understanding your pain, managing and living with it!

Suffering constant daily ongoing pain can be life changing and to put it simply an outright nightmare. Especially if you have to load yourself up with pain management pills daily, effective pain management comes from understanding its source and triggers and working with the body and mind together with schedules, strategies, timing and discipline to keep to a plan.

Sometimes the little things we can do to make changes, sometimes pass us by because we don’t have the discipline to keep doing those little things. And we fall back into deeper pain, but the little things we do will help in the long run even though we can’t see that now.

We all experience pain. Pain is essential for our protection. And that pain can be physical, emotional, long term or short term and while most people are always looking for ways to reduce pain or avoid further pain, the reality is that it needs to be understood first, rather than just eliminating it and thinking we need to be pain free as for many people, that’s not possible.

Pain is an inbuilt signal and it tells us to avoid danger or that something is wrong or has gone wrong within the body. And in serious situations it becomes essential and protects you from any further harm or what the environment is throwing at you.

For example, if you touch something hot like fire or your cooker, your reflex response action is to pull your hand back away from that pain, so in this scenario, pain is doing exactly what it was designed or evolved to do and that is to protect us.

Chronic and ongoing pain is different and it can persist long after an injury has healed without a clear physical cause. This is where some people might call it stress related or psychosomatic or even subconscious pain and it involves the nervous system the brain’s functioning and emotional factors or emotional disturbances and for some people this can involve self-punishment, self-harm or even guilt.

Whether people believe it or not. The nervous system and the subconscious mind plays a main role in how and why pain is experienced. When pain signals are sent excessively and repeatedly throughout the body and mind, the body develops sensitivity and or over sensitivity which is often called sensitisation and overtime the threshold for pain lowers which means why some people can experience even small triggers producing a greater response and this is why we can experience discomfort even when there is no clear injury. Or when injuries have now passed and supposedly healed.

Therefore, managing this type of pain involves calming down the nervous system and to identify the triggers that fire it up, such as using certain controlled breathing techniques, relaxation and gentle movements to reduce overall tension and stress. Although these techniques and practises can be helpful, they don’t always remove pain or remove it instantly, but will reduce its intensity and make it more manageable by changing the way you relate or feel with that pain and its two-way relationship.

Another point to note is that too much rest and inactivity can make things worse, complete inactivity can make the situation go through the roof as well as muscles can weaken and your joints can stiffen and even circulation can be restricted or reduced. So gentle and regular movements help maintain better blood flow and increased well-being overtime.

Poor sleep, anger issues and worrying all the time will certainly increase sensitivity to your pain and weaken your threshold and your body’s ability to recover and little things which would not be a problem in the past are now taken on board so establishing better sleep patterns with discipline and schedule and sticking to it will create a calmer environment for more rest and can make the difference in the long run. Each increments of change that you apply can build on improvements.

This area is the area that people don’t know about related to pain, and that is the psychological area or the psychological aspect in how you think about the pain, can also make it worse and how you feel it. And constant focus and worry will amplify it and make it worse, so breathing techniques and even mindfulness, just for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening is a start.

Just by sending your body into deep, relaxed states, will all help. And this doesn’t mean that you are pushing away the pain or ignoring it. It just means you are settling yourself down in the gaps and the spaces around the pain and around how you have to deal with it and tolerate and put up with it each day, instead of sending negativity to it all the time by bad thinking.

You can just settle yourself down and treat it more gently. Treat it with kindness. Treat it with respect and it will come back at you with more respect, more appreciation. Because at the end of the day it’s you and only you, the self that is at work.

Stop fighting with yourself.

What we call stress and anything that falls under the umbrella of stress is very linked closely to pain as well. Especially if pain is always there and when your body becomes pressurised or under stress, muscles will naturally tighten and the nervous system becomes more reactive and ready for fight or flight. This is naturally built in to us all and this increases discomfort and triggers emotional responses as well. We just start to feel ratty and horrible inside and this spills over to our world view and how we feel about others as well, especially letting out negativity, anger and criticism onto our loved ones. And they have to tolerate and put up with us. In some situations and circumstances you may need to obtain professional support such as psychotherapists, physiotherapists, doctors and other specialists in the fields of pain management and in particular working with areas that could be affected by pain but not directly pain causing, these support services are always helpful because they can teach you and show you ways to provide exercise treatments and structured daily plans around your pain management and to support any recovery from injury that is needed. Balance is the key and you should always be open to professional advice, instead of sitting in silence and suffering.

Apart from medication which a person may already be on, a useful approach is what’s called pacing and this involves managing activity levels and monitoring the levels of stress, anxiety and tolerances so they don’t push too high up. Which then cause setbacks as many people fall into this cycle of doing too much, taking on board too much negativity, not being able to cope with the pain and setting other things off and spoiling the day as pacing helps, creates more balance and consistency and again could be beneficial in the long term.

When a combination of pain management techniques come together only when they’re combined. Not just one or two things, but 5, 6, or 7 things all working together surprisingly, you may find you emerge with more tolerance and feel easier with the pain.

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