Episode # 118- Pain is a Danger Signal

New pain science teaches something different than what I learned in Physical Therapy school  20 years ago.

 

Pain is not directly related to the amount of injury present in the body.

 

Pain does not indicate tissue damage, but rather pain is a danger signal.

 

Research into chronic pain shows the brain actually processes it differently once it’s lasted past 3-6 months.

 

There are 44 areas of the brain associated with chronic pain, and the main one is the center of learning and memory.

 

Just as pain can become learned, it can become unlearned - through pain Reprocessing therapy (PRT)

 

Listen for more info and research about how pain is a dangerous signal, and how it can be unlearned by PRT.

 

Plus click below for my special PRT-based group if you have back or neck pain specifically.

 

This six month group will walk you through PRT concepts, the latest research on back and necks, and even individual coaching sessions for deeper somatic work- all for an amazing low price:

 

https://www.bodyandmindlifecoach.com/happy-back-&-neck-club

Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 118, Pain is a Danger Signal. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become unstoppable body and mind. Hello, my loves. This episode is about a basic concept in pain reprocessing, that pain is a danger signal.
And if you are suffering from chronic back or neck pain, stay till the end and listen, I have something special for you. So basically this idea, this concept, that pain is a danger signal, is something that I recently learned. And I was a physical therapist for 20 years.
I worked with people in pain, a lot of people in chronic pain, but I never knew there was a distinction between the types of pain. When an injury is new and just healing, like if someone sprains their ankle and it's healing, that's different. It's actually processed differently and different parts of the brain light up than when pain becomes chronic, which generally they consider three to six months.
That's the normal healing time. Actually, a bone's normal healing time is six to 12 weeks. So within about three months, even a bone has healed.
So we know our body can heal, it knows how to heal, and we also know from brain scans of people with chronic pain that it's processed differently in the brain. And we also know now that all pain is produced in the brain. So the signals from the body come up to the brain for processing, and the brain determines what is important enough to send pain down to in the body.
So imagine that someone is being chased by a tiger and sprains their ankle. They are not even going to feel the pain of the sprained ankle as they're running from the tiger for their life. But when they are in a safer situation, they will feel that ankle pain so that they stop walking on it and tend to the injury.
So we know that pain is not related to the amount of injury, and actually many studies of pain-free people have now confirmed that. There have been studies of over 3,000 people who do not have back pain, and they find that things like disc bulges and herniations and degeneration and facet impingement, spondylolisthesis, so many different things that they used to say were causing pain are actually found in pain-free people. One study found that 64% of people with no back pain had disc bulges, protrusions, herniations, or disc degenerations.
So the majority of people have these things in their body, they're not causing chronic pain. I even found one study studying healthy, pain-free athletes. Oh, young athletes.
So people performing well without pain, and they're young, 89% of them had a hip labral tear. So usually we're not doing MRIs or imaging on people who do not have pain. But when they have, they start to find that there are normal abnormalities within the body that not everyone gets pain from, and especially chronic pain.
Chronic pain is actually involving many different areas of the brain, 44 different areas. About half of these areas of the brain are involved in increasing pain, and about half are involved in decreasing pain. So chronic pain is much more complicated than acute pain, how it presents in the brain after the neural pathways have been learned.
And one of the main areas associated with chronic pain in the brain, the anterior insula, is associated with learning and memory. So you can think of chronic pain as habits learned by the brain, pain patterns, muscle memory, basically, but through pain learned in the brain. Just like Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to have a response.
I didn't know this, but apparently Pavlov untrained his dogs from that response as well. And you can actually unlearn your pain through the steps of pain reprocessing therapy. When you learn that pain is a danger signal and does not mean that tissue is injured, it's like a smoke alarm that's going off when the toaster is cooking toast rather than when there's an actual fire.
So when the way we react to it can be different, we can help the brain unlearn pain. One thing we now know about chronic pain is the brain will produce more pain when the emotion of fear is involved. There are a few studies showing this.
And the first involved a hot probe and showing people some pictures. There were pleasant pictures and scary pictures. First of all, they noticed when people looked at the scary pictures, they would report greater pain with the hot probe.
And sometimes they would report pain even without the hot probe, but only when they were looking at the scary pictures and not with the pleasant ones. So we can see that the brain can produce pain when it senses danger and there's fear. Another example is a placebo car crash study that they did in Germany.
They made people believe that they were hit by a car, though they really just broke some glass and made it seem that way, but people were never actually hit. But 20% of the people did develop whiplash. And four weeks later, 10% of the people still had whiplash symptoms, even though they were never hit by another car.
And what was interesting about this group is that they were the ones that had the most emotional stress and distress in their lives at the time of this experiment. So basically, their nervous system was already stretched thin, plus something stressful, and their brain produced real symptoms of whiplash and pain in their body. One last very interesting case was a construction worker who jumped down and a nail went all the way through his boot.
He was in severe agony. They had to sedate him in order to cut his boot off. And then to their surprise, they found that he had no injury, not even a scratch.
The nail had perfectly gone between the toes, and there was no tissue damage whatsoever. Up until that point, though, he had very real pain. His brain looked at the situation with the nail through his boot and made the assumption that he would need to get medical attention and sent a lot of pain to that area to prevent him from walking on it and causing more damage.
But all that was really happening is the toes were getting some safe signals from the body of some pressure, but no damage. But the brain interpreted those signals as dangerous and created pain. Neuroplastic pain is when the brain interprets normal signals as dangerous and produces pain.
Usually, what we see happen with chronic pain is one of two things. It happens kind of spontaneously. People wake up with it.
Often, it's during a stressful time in their lives and they develop a new symptom. Or maybe you have had an injury. You were playing basketball and hurt your back, and you might have noticed and linked certain movements with pain.
So long after the tissue has healed, the brain can still create pain through predictive coding, and when the brain believes the area is still injured or needs protecting or guarding, it can still produce tightening and pain in that area with those movements or other random times. Usually what we see with chronic pain is it starts in one area and then ends up spreading to other areas or jumping from one area to another. When we can start to see this as more nervous system and fear-related and normal signals being misinterpreted as dangerous, then we can help the brain to rewire, to form new neural pathways and to unlearn this pain response, basically producing it less and less and less.
This is what pain reprocessing therapy teaches about, basic ways to do that, sending the brain messages of safety, different ways to somatically teach that to the brain and body. But it really starts with an education and this paradigm shift and starting to realize that pain is not reflective of the amount of damage in your body or injury. In the Boulder Back Pain Study, they found that people whose pain decreased the most were the people who changed their belief the most about pain being related to injury.
So that is, when they have a sensation of pain, not necessarily assuming it means that something is damaged or hurt or they've overdone it, learning new strategies to respond to with those sensations. And then by responding in different ways, the brain produces pain less and less until it becomes extinct. They showed in the Boulder Back Pain Study that rewiring chronic pain is possible for people who even have very severe structural changes.
There was one woman who had scoliosis, so her back was shaped like an S, over 73 degrees of scoliosis, and she was able to get out of chronic pain, and she didn't have to even do anything to straighten the spine. She stopped seeing her pain as dangerous. She was able to convince herself and her nervous system and brain on the body level that the sensations from her body are okay and safe, not dangerous, and then the brain produced that pain less and less and less.
If you are interested in learning more about pain reprocessing therapy, and especially if you have back or neck pain, I have an extra special offer for you. Although pain reprocessing therapy works on all the different types of body pains, if it's chronic, shoulder pain, knee pain, ankle pain, I am putting together a group just focused on people who have back and neck pain. First of all, that's very researched.
There's a lot more research on backs and necks because that's much more common in America for chronic pain. And because I've had back pain, some chronic back pain issues myself, I've dealt with a lot of people with back pain as a physical therapist, so I have a lot of the Western medicine knowledge about that. And I also have some special techniques up my sleeve, like kinesiotaping, which I think helps relax the nervous system.
It's like a moving brace for your body. So I have some specific information for people with back and neck pain who want to apply the pain reprocessing approach and get rid of their chronic pain. There will be group calls each week for our small group of just 10 people starting next week.
So I get these ideas and I act on them. So hopefully, you're listening to this podcast in real time, or maybe I'll be running another group like this in the future. It's called Happy Back and Neck Club.
And definitely, this is going to be my best priced offer if you're listening to this and get in on the offer now. Basically, I will be offering six months of group coaching calls involving training, especially months one through three to have some of the basics of pain reprocessing and the research that we know with Baxonex, as well as all of the support with the group calls. There'll be a private Facebook group for our little group.
And you will also get a three-month one-on-one coaching package with me included in this club. So this is 12 weekly sessions. Or if you want to even front load them and do two a week, you can get the amount of support that you're needing at the time that you need it.
You can listen to episode 79 about Kathleen and her chronic back pain recovery. And she was one that I coached for three months of one-on-one sessions. So three months of one-on-one sessions is super powerful, as well as the group coaching and the time that you're going to give yourself for six months to integrate and apply this information as you're rewiring your brain and neural pathways and your nervous system.
The one-on-one sessions are going to be an hour with me on Zoom where we can do somatic work, deep diving into some of your questions. And if you haven't experienced one-on-one coaching, I've been doing a lot of these single clarity sessions for people lately. And even in one session, they're reporting less pain, less anxiety, more joy in their lives.
So imagine what three months of one-on-one coaching could do for you. To get this program going, it is a very special, amazing low price of just $1,500. And if you purchase by Friday the 22nd, I will throw in three extra one-on-one sessions.
So 15 one-on-one sessions with me, $1,500 plus the whole group container. It's an amazing, amazing deal. So please jump on that if it's calling to you.
I'd love to have you in the group. There will be more information in the show notes, so be sure and check that out there. All right, guys.
Have a great week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me.
Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.