Episode#49- How To React To Pain

The way you react when you feel pain, determines whether you continue to wire you brain for pain or not. 

 

When you respond with fear, anxiety, worry, stress or urgency, then your brain gets feedback that the sensation it is feeling is very important.  The brain prioritizes looking for pain.  And the hyper vigilance and guarding actually CREATE more and more pain pathways!

 

When you can respond neutrally, the brain does not see it as a high priority.  Since it is not urgent, the brain can stop focusing on anticipating and creating pain.

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 49, How to React to Pain. 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 friends, thanks for listening today. I am going to tell you about how to react when you have pain. Now, I used to teach this a lot for several years, decades even as a physical therapist.
I taught people to tune into their bodies and to be very sensitive to any kind of pain, any kind of sensation that they would have in their body, and immediately link it to whatever activity they were doing. So I had a very physical approach. That's how I was trained in physical therapy, to look at the body as a structure, as a machine.
And if parts were broken, then we could do some exercises, maybe our stretches, some mechanical, physical things, in order to fix them. And now, what I've learned from studying research in neuroscience, is that the structures are not really shown to cause pain. Now, of course, sometimes if you sprain your ankle, or there's an acute injury, there will be a sensation of pain from your body to your brain, indicating that there's some problems, there's an injury, there's something that might be causing damage.
But that can even be overridden. Imagine if someone's being chased by a bear, and they've sprained their ankle, they won't even be feeling that ankle if they're running for their life. So we know that the perception of pain can vary depending on the situation.
Pain as this danger signal is very important to the brain. But what we learn from neuroscience is that when conditions become chronic, there are more pain pathways that are originating in the brain and felt in the body, not going from the body to the brain. Plus, you may have heard me say there's plenty of MRI research, hundreds of studies of healthy people, even professional athletes with no complaints of pain or resulting limitations in their function, who have torn rotator cuffs, meniscuses, menisci, meniscuses, I don't know, a torn meniscus or two on a knee, disc bulges, herniations.
That is so common in people, basically over age 40. If you've lived a few decades on the earth, you'll have some wrinkles on your face, and you'll have some wear and tear to your body. The perception of pain is so interesting.
There's a girl on my daughter's soccer team who ran with a dirt bike straight into a storage container, broke some bones in her face. The doctor said she still has broken bones in her face around her eye, and it's been three weeks, and she said she feels no pain. And she's out there playing soccer, running around, I would think jostling those bones.
She has no pain, no sensation of pain. And at that point, is there a threat? So if you're always taught that any painful sensation in your body means that something physically is the cause of it, then it's very easy to think that when something doesn't get better, that it means that the structure is still not healed or it continues to be damaged, or there really is something that needs to be on high alert, and you need to really watch out for and be looking for and be guarded.
So think about what happens when you're guarded. You tense up, right? When you have fear if something's going to hurt or not, you can even be sitting in a chair and thinking of a movement and start to tense up in your back.
So we know that more is going on than just what is structurally happening. And the difficult thing is that when we feel the sensation of pain, and we believe that it is structural, and we are basically giving feedback to our brain that this is important, there might be some damage, I wonder why it's not healing, it hasn't gone away yet, maybe this is never going to go away, what's the rest of my day going to look like? All of those kinds of things increase your stress level, increase the sense of fight or flight in that amygdala.
And so when the amygdala, the area that kind of processes all of the sensations, the information and the emotions, it's in the limbic system and emotional center of the brain, there's this part that's called the amygdala, and when it gets basically overstimulated, then signals can get mixed up. Things can be perceived as pain from the body, and it's actually from the brain down to the body. It can all be linked back to heightened states of arousal, stress, fight or flight that people are in chronically.
I mean, we are basically living in fight or flight, most of us. Have you ever been on vacation, laying on a beach, and you're still stressing out about things? It's because this is our normal.
Our cells are used to a certain amount of cortisol. We want to have a little bit of stress in our lives. It keeps us motivated.
All of these things, when we actually look at the thoughts and the feelings that are creating these neurochemicals, they can all actually be modified. They can be changed. If the pain has lasted for several years, and if you have tried many different things, physical things, if you've tried all the physical things that were suggested and nothing has worked for you, then please consider that you might have some emotions involved, that this might be something that you can actually work on on the emotional level, which they're showing most chronic pain and disease cases are, to a large degree.
So I want to really talk about what to do when you feel the sensation of pain. As much as you can, you want to react calmly. I know it's counterintuitive.
It's totally different than what I used to teach my patients. I used to teach them to fear, but that actually ramps up the nervous system and causes more pain to be created. So what you want to do is signal to the brain that it's not important, that it's boring, that it's not a big deal.
Maybe you can think, my body is strong, my back is strong. Maybe you can think, this is emotional, I'll deal with it later. Maybe you can think parasympathetic, you know, like the nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
Maybe you can just take a deep breath when you feel the pain. But I'm telling you, the more you can really believe, it sounds like some faith-based kind of thing, or like a cult or something, like you really have to believe, but this is why. The more you can, at the neurological level, at the nervous system level, respond back with a sensation of pain in your body, neutrally, then your brain doesn't keep thinking that it's important, doesn't stay on the lookout for it constantly.
When you're always looking for pain, more and more of your brain gets devoted to looking for and creating pain. So what you want to do is feel that sensation and react as neutrally as possible. Those meditations where I have you go into the body and describe the sensation, that's one way.
You can describe it neutrally, like my back doesn't feel as loose as I would like it to right now. Or you could have like a code word for your pain. You could call it banana or something, like, oh, that banana is back.
You could talk to your body, like, oh, neck, I hear you. You're getting really stressed. You're tightening up.
I'll journal about this later. We'll talk about this later. It's okay right now.
And then as much as you can, forget about it. Don't base your day around it. Try to not pain catastrophize.
Try to really not talk to people about your pain. The less you can make it important to your brain, the less your brain will create pain. So there are a lot of rhyming words there.
Every time I rhyme, I want to say, that's a rhyme. So become the observer of your body. Feel the sensations as neutrally as possible.
Describe them with neutral words, or kind of ignore them if possible. You don't have to be mean to them. You don't have to say you're not allowed here.
They're allowed here. It's going to be here. It's going to be in the passenger seat, or maybe in the back seat.
It's coming along with you, those sensations. But maybe you can still drive wherever you want to go that day. The more you can accept that it's there, but not really let it dictate you anymore.
Try and make peace with it. Try and observe it. Try to accept it.
And try to ignore it. Just try to be neutral with it. I know it's easier said than done.
If you've had some success with this, I would love to hear your comments. You can go over to Instagram, or YouTube, or Facebook. Body and Mind Life Coach.
And watch it and comment there. Thanks, you guys. See you next 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.