Unstoppable Body and Mind

Episode #70- Mindfulness and Pain

In this episode, I talk about how more mindful people are less likely to pain catastrophize.  Which means, they will create less pain from their brain. (Last Episode #69 I talked all about how fear causes the brain to PRODUCE more pain that you feel in the body- The Pain-Fear-Pain Cycle).

 

This week we dive into understanding mindfulness more by how they measure mindfulness in research.

 

Here are some statements reflecting low mindfulness:

*I could be experiencing some emotion and not be conscious of it until some time later.

*I break or spill things because of carelessness, not paying attention, or thinking of something else. 

*I find it difficult to stay focused on what’s happening in the present. 

*I tend to walk quickly to get where I’m going without paying attention to what I experience along the way. 

*I tend not to notice feelings of physical tension or discomfort until they really grab my attention. 

*I forget a person’s name almost as soon as I’ve been told it for the first time. 

 

Here are some statements reflecting more mindfulness:

*I think before reacting under stressful situations.

*I can calm down soon after experiencing distressing thoughts and impulses.

*I can describe my feelings well.

*I can perceive emotions without reacting to them.

*I am aware of the bodily sensations when I take a bath.

*I can easily talk about my thoughts and opinions.

*I can watch my feelings without getting attached to them.

 

Listen to find out more about how your thoughts affect your pain!

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Transcript:

Episode #70- Mindfulness and Pain

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 70, Mindfulness and Pain. In this podcast, we learn 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. Today, we are going to talk about the relationship between mindfulness and pain.

 

But first, I would like to ask if any of you have been enjoying this podcast and haven't yet gone over to iTunes to give it a rating and review. Please look in the show notes. You can follow the link there, and you can just write a few sentences or what you like about the podcast.

 

Give it a five-star rating, and that will help the podcast be found by more people and get the message out. I have about 300 or 400 downloads per week. So I know you guys are listening.

 

There's only about 57 reviews. So those of you that haven't done it yet, it would be really awesome. I'd appreciate it.

 

And with that being said, let's go ahead and move on to this topic. I've been super excited to learn more about. As I started to do research, I've been learning about what I talked about last week, the pain-fear pain cycle, and how having the reaction of fear to the pain signal will actually amplify the not only perception, but the production of more pain by the brain.

 

So what they've also found is that people who have more mindfulness, if they're more mindful, they have less pain catastrophizing. So pain catastrophizing I talked about last week. It's one way of looking at how fearful a person is about their pain, how they're perceiving it, how they're thinking about it.

 

So when people have more pain catastrophizing, that correlates with higher pain, more chances that they'll have a new acute pain, more chances that their acute pain will turn chronic, and even high catastrophizing before surgery predicts longer outcomes and a more difficult recovery. So it's important to look at these kinds of statements that people may think are just true and may say and realize that pain actually is influence by the way we're thinking and talking about our pain. So I want to talk a little bit more about mindfulness and its relation to pain.

 

People who score as more mindful have less pain intensity, less negative affect, less pain catastrophizing, less pain-related fear, less pain hypervigilance, and less functional disability. So in general, people who are more mindful have less pain. Now, in understanding mindfulness, I found a couple of scales that they use to measure mindfulness, and I'm going to read some of the statements so that you can see if you strongly resonate with some of them or if they're things that you don't think very often.

 

Just see if they seem familiar to you. They did a lot to me. So here are some statements from the mindfulness scale.

 

See if you agree with them a lot or just a little. I could be experiencing some emotion and not be conscious of it until sometime later. I break or spill things because of carelessness, not paying attention or thinking of something else.

 

I find it difficult to stay focused on what's happening in the present. I tend to walk quickly to get where I'm going without paying attention to what I experience along the way. I tend not to notice feelings of physical tension or discomfort unless they really grab my attention.

 

I forget a person's name almost as soon as I've been told it for the first time. Oh my gosh, that one. All of them so far, but especially that one.

 

It seems I'm running on automatic without much awareness of what I'm doing. I rush through activities without being really attentive to them. I get so focused on the goal I want to achieve that I lose touch with what I'm doing right now to get there.

 

I do jobs or tasks automatically without being aware of what I'm doing. I find myself listening to someone with one ear doing something else at the same time. I drive places on automatic pilot and then wonder why I went there.

 

I find myself preoccupied with the future or the past. I find myself doing things without paying attention. I snack without being aware that I'm eating.

 

Okay, so do any of those sound like things that describe you sometimes or a lot? That could show that you're not being mindful. I'm talking especially to all those people with chronic pain and disease that, like me, are probably perfectionistic, have a harsh inner critic, people pleasers, want to be good all the time.

 

So if you find yourself resonating with some of these things, first of all, know that I did with most of them, except for where I drive. Usually I know why I went there. But anyway, this is for your information, and especially just realizing this correlation between mindfulness and pain might not have been something that you've ever been told before or ever known before.

 

I know that definitely I didn't know about it until I started doing some research. So the other way that they measure mindfulness in a lot of the studies is with the FFMQ, which is the five facet mindfulness questionnaire. And I think this helps understanding what mindfulness is to look at how they measure it.

 

The five facets that they measure of mindfulness in this questionnaire are observation, which is the way we use our sensory awareness. So what we see or feel or perceive internally and externally, kind of what we focus on. Description, the way we label our experiences of the world, how we express them in words.

 

Aware actions, which is how we handle a stressful situation. Do we act out of quick judgment or we get out of autopilot quickly? The fourth facet is non-judgmental inner experience.

 

So that's the inner critic, not letting the inner critic take a toll on our happiness. This happens with self-acceptance and self-compassion. The last facet is non-reactivity.

 

So detachment from negative thoughts and emotions so we can accept their existence and choose not to react to them. Non-reactivity makes way for emotional resilience and restores mental balance. So these are the five facets of mindfulness that they measure.

 

And I want to read the statements from this questionnaire and again, see how you relate to some of these statements. See if any of them stand out to you and see if you're surprised by any of them. I know that I was.

 

So first, I'm going to read the statements that suggest less mindfulness. So something that if you're not as mindful, you might find yourself saying, I criticize myself for having irrational emotions and thoughts. How many of you do that?

 

I know that's very common with me and the people that I coach. We have irrational emotions and thoughts. We criticize ourselves, a lot of us.

 

But someone who's more mindful and compassionate towards themselves would not do that. I judge my thoughts as good or bad. I find it difficult to sustain focus.

 

I don't pay attention to my work as I'm busy daydreaming most of the time. I find it hard to express what I feel and easily distracted. I'm aware that some of my thoughts are not normal, and I know that I shouldn't feel that way.

 

This is low mindfulness. I find it difficult to describe my body sensations in words. I sometimes feel that I'm not in complete awareness of myself.

 

So did you find yourself agreeing with some of those statements? Which ones did you agree with strongly or less strongly? So as far as the statements that suggest more mindfulness, I'll read you those now.

 

While walking, I'm aware of the sensations in my body. I can describe my feelings well. I can perceive emotions without reacting to them.

 

I'm aware of the bodily sensations when I take a bath. I can easily talk about my thoughts and opinions. I can watch my feelings without getting attached to them.

 

I can feel how eating and drinking affect my body and mind. I can feel pure sensations like the wind or the sunlight touching my skin. I step back when I catch myself thinking something negative or distressing.

 

I can pay attention to the clock ticking, birds chirping, and cars passing. I think before reacting under stressful situations. I can calm down soon after experiencing distressing thoughts and impulses.

 

So here you can see what more of mindfulness might look like, being aware of how the body feels. And I would just say, you know, this isn't geared towards people in chronic pain necessarily, but the pendulum can swing a little far the other way when you're in chronic pain. So be aware if you're very, very hyper aware, hyper vigilant of your body sensations and reacting with fear.

 

That's not exactly what it's talking about. Maybe are you sensitive to any pleasant sensations in your body? That could be something to work towards.

 

If you're focusing more on negative sensations, because that's what you have a lot of. Do you notice how when there were emotions, there was not judgment about them? When there were stressful situations, the person is more able to think about what's going on, detach themselves from the reaction.

 

There's more emotional resilience. I think of mindfulness as being in the present moment. If you are focusing on something in your body, especially in a pleasant or neutral way, you are in the present moment.

 

That's why the breathing can be such a tool. If you are focusing on the breath, then you can't be thinking about the past or worrying about something in the future. I hope I gave you some things to think about this week with your relationship between mindfulness, being present, experiencing your sensations, and what you're experiencing with your sensation of pain.

 

Next week, I'm going to be talking about strategies to increase your mindfulness, which will help with decreasing pain. Be sure and get on my email list if you're not already. I'll be sending out Fun Fact Friday weekly research articles relating to healing and the power of thoughts.

 

And as well, I'll be telling you where I'll be going live and any events coming up. So go ahead and check out my website, bodyandmindlifecoach.com, if you want information or to get on my mailing list. All right, you guys, have a great week.

 

Bye. 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.

Episode #69- The Pain-Fear-Pain Cycle

This episode is all about how fear of pain causes the brain to CREATE more pain- the Pain-Fear-Pain Cycle.

The way you recover from pain depends on how you respond to pain signals in your body.

Many people with chronic pain tend to "catastrophize", or attach greater meaning or significance to pain.  There are also physiologic changes in the brain, making chronic pain sufferers more hypersensitive to perceived threats. 

These things actually cause the brain to create more pain signals.  Real pain that is felt in the body.

How you react to pain makes a difference, so listen today and see how you can learn to rewire your brain!

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Unstoppable Body and Mind Podcast Transcripts- Episode #69- The Pain-Fear-Pain Cycle:

“This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode number 69, The Pain, Fear, Pain Cycle. 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. Today, we are going to talk about how when you react to pain with fear, it actually ends up producing more pain.

 

Now, if you've just tried listening to this podcast and want to watch it, I am going to be including some pictures and a diagram. So you can watch this podcast with video on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. Look for me, Body and Mind Life Coach.

 

Okay, so we're going to talk about how fear produces pain. And I like to start with this story about a construction worker who stepped on a nail that went completely through his boot. This is where I'll be showing you a picture.

 

The nail completely impaled through his boot, and he was in severe pain. He was rushed to the hospital, they gave him morphine, and then they cut off the boot and saw that the nail had completely missed his tissue. It had gone through that space in the toes and had actually not gone through his foot at all.

 

But the pain that his brain created was real pain. His brain, just like all of ours, did his best to interpret the signals from the environment, and his brain perceived that as dangerous. So pain is in essence an alarm signal, a danger signal.

 

Any kind of alarm or danger signal perceived in this area of the brain can cause the brain to create pain, real pain, that is felt in the body. Now, in his case, the danger signal was that there was potential injury, that there was a nail through his boot and supposedly his foot. So to stop what he's doing, to remedy the situation, to take care of it, to rest.

 

But we do know that these alarm signals, these danger signals, can be created from a number of different reasons, including emotions and what we're talking about today, fear. So fear can actually be a danger signal that causes the brain to produce more pain. So just thinking of how your body reacts when you're in fear, you might think of like tightening, you know, kind of hunching over with drawing.

 

That made sense to me as a physical therapist that the chronic tightness of your muscles is actually going to lead to more pain. I would see this with people who had been in a car accident, for example, and their neck was moved quickly and forcefully, and the muscles around tried to protect by tightening up. Unfortunately, the tightening would cause pain, and then the patient that I would see would be in more pain, which would cause the muscles to tighten up, kind of this vicious cycle.

 

There is research showing that people that have more fear about pain also report higher perceptions of pain. So your brain becomes hypersensitized when you have chronic pain. It's almost like the brain is always on the lookout for pain- what might happen, and more and more of your brain becomes focused on pain.

 

The prevention of pain, the avoidance of pain, the fear of pain, and pain starts to consume people's lives. So the brain activity of people who have chronic pain is more active when there is some kind of stimulus. And that could even be a sound that you don't like, like nails on a chalkboard.

 

People with chronic pain, their brain is more active when they hear something that's unpleasant. It's like their brain is always on guard and hypervigilant for anything that could be perceived as a danger. The perception of pain can be higher with fear.

 

There was a study where people were given a mild electric shock, and when fearful words or words that were pain-related were said before the shock was given, people did respond with higher perception of pain than they did if the words were just neutral words or even negative words that were not pain-related. And then there has also been a lot of research done showing that the brain actually produces more pain in response to the emotion of fear. One measure of fear that they talk a lot about in pain research is called catastrophizing.

 

So catastrophizing is something that happens quite normally with people when they've been enduring pain for some time. They tend to magnify or exaggerate the perceived threat or seriousness of pain. There's a lot of pain-related warrior fear and difficulty diverting your attention from the pain.

 

In research, they'll sometimes group people who are high catastrophizing or they tend to have more of these catastrophizing qualities versus low catastrophizing people. And what they've found is that people who rank higher with catastrophizing also have increased risk of future back pain. People who catastrophized more before surgery were more likely to have post-operative pain and a longer recovery time.

 

People who catastrophize have a higher risk of their acute pain turning into chronic pain. After whiplash in one study, catastrophizing and fear of movement were significant predictors of both disability and depression. And catastrophizing has been shown to increase people's risks of new acute pain.

 

Now I'm going to read to you what some of these statements might sound like so you can identify how much you might be catastrophizing. This is from a measurement tool called the Pain Catastrophizing Scale. 

 

And you would rate your response from zero being not at all to four being all of the time.

 

So think about these statements as I read them. Are these things that run through your head? I worry all the time about whether the pain will end.

 

I feel like I can't go on. It's terrible, and I think it's never going to get any better. It's awful, and I feel that it overwhelms me.

 

I feel I can't stand it anymore. I'm afraid the pain will get worse. I keep thinking of other painful events.

 

I anxiously want the pain to go away. I can't seem to keep it out of my mind. I keep thinking about how much it hurts.

 

I keep thinking about how badly I want the pain to stop. There's nothing I can do to reduce the intensity of the pain. I wonder whether something serious may happen.

 

So you can see there are elements of worry about the future, fear, hopelessness, and all of these sentiments and thoughts are predictors that you will have more and more pain. People are more likely to catastrophize their pain if they've seen a parent or a loved one that suffered with chronic pain or illness or health conditions. And we're going to talk a lot next episode about how mindfulness actually helps decrease pain catastrophizing.

 

Remember the number one way to rewire your brain to produce less pain is when you have the pain signal to react with neutrality, with calm, and actually with a feeling of safety in your body, a visceral somatic feeling that you are safe. 

 

And this sends the message back to your brain that it does not need to worry about this and continue to produce pain. 

 

Now, if you've heard me talk about the thought model we use in coaching, we know that the feelings of fear that we have are coming from our thoughts and beliefs.  The fear is not coming from the pain signal in the body itself. We know this because people react very differently to pain signals that they receive. When you have a pain signal, that would be like the circumstance.

 

A circumstance is just something that happens in reality. So there's a pain signal. And then what's causing the fear is not the pain signal itself, it's the way of thinking about the pain signal, the way you're interpreting it.

 

So maybe you have a belief that there is some damage, and maybe you've been told that there is damage, and you have a diagnosis. And so when you feel that pain signal, you might even imagine the degeneration or the nerve or the area that they've told you was torn, and you might be thinking of that and creating more meaning behind that pain signal. And we know from neuroscience, the way we react to pain determines if the pain signal will be amplified or minimized.

 

There's one chart I want to share with you. If you're listening on the podcast, I'll try to include it in the show notes, at least on my website. I'll email it out if you're on my email list, and I did post it in my social media today.

 

I'm going to describe it as best I can if you're just listening, but look for that figure if it doesn't make sense. Basically, when you have a stimulus of pain, there's a pain experience. And then the chart splits.

 

It could go one of two ways. If you go to the side where there's a fear of pain, it could lead to avoidance of activity. That leads to disuse, disability, depression, and loops back around to the pain experience again in this cycle where the pain and fear of pain increase the pain experience itself.

 

On the other hand, when you have the pain experience and you do not react with fear, then there is confrontation and recovery. Confrontation is the period of time where your brain is learning that this pain is not dangerous, maybe the movements that you're thinking are dangerous are not as bad as you think. It's basically showing your brain that it's okay, which teaches it not to continue, to look for the pain, and not to continue to create the pain.

 

When the pain is experienced and goes down the route of no fear, then that is what leads to recovery. Now, I want to bring this up to you because it is very important to understand how much your fear is relating to the pain that you are feeling. Now, if you are in a lot of current pain, this may seem difficult to just not have fear.

 

And there are some specific strategies I talk a lot about on my podcast. And if you're struggling with your belief that this is a structural issue that's causing pain, then you should get on a free 60-minute call with me, and we can go through your specific case and really evaluate in your situation if this is work that will help you. All right, my loves, have a great week.

 

Bye. 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."

Episode #68- Therapy vs. Coaching

Do you know how therapy and coaching are different?  

 

In this episode I tell you what therapy and coaching have in common, what their focuses are, and how to determine if therapy or coaching is for you!

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Episode #67- Words Matter

In this episode  I talk all about the importance of the words you use!  

Inspired today by this quote by Bruce Lee,

“Don’t speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke.  Your body is energy and casts spells, that is why it is called spelling.  Change the way you speak about yourself, and you can change your life.  What you’re not changing, you are also choosing.”

We can see how words matter with the placebo effect and how pain is interpreted.  There is also power in the words we use to describe ourselves, and limiting beliefs we might have.  

Words matter when we talk about our mind, our age, and with pain.

Listen to find out more!

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Episode #66-You Are Safe Meditation

This week I give you a short meditation that you can use to increase the feeling of safety in your body.

 

When you are feeling stressed, anxiety or chronic pain, you are essentially in fight or flight.  In this meditation, I help you find the PARASYMPATHETIC state of rest and repair (where your body can heal). 

 

Feeling safe in your body is the number one way to rewire the brain and nervous system to generate less pain.  This meditation will help you find a safe place mentally, and create the feeling of safety in the body.

 

Try and re-create this feeing of safety in your body and mind throughout the day, maybe hundreds of times.  You can do this "micro-relaxation" 200-300 times a day to retrain your brain.

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Episode # 65- Interview with Dr. Howard Schubiner

Today’s episode is not to be missed! 

I interview Dr. Howard Schubiner- a Pioneer, Researcher and Leader in Mind-Body Medicine.

Howard is such a kind and sweet person, and explains pain and neural circuits in a compassionate, scientific, and easy to understand way. 

He has developed a protocol for diagnosing neural circuit pain (also called neuroplastic pain, neurogenic pain, TMS, Mind-body Syndrome). 

And he trains medical professionals to unlearn what they have been taught, and become aware of the role the brain plays in generating pain.

Today’s episode covers understanding the brain’s role in pain, and how to tell if your pain is a neural circuit disorder.

If you have not yet given my podcast a rating or review, PLEASE do that here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Join the Body and Mind Life Coach Facebook Group here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/231187234912768

You can find the video of this interview with subtitles there!  And this is where I'll be live each week to coach and answer questions!

 

If you haven't yet seen Dr Schubiner's YouTube videos explaining pain, check out #1 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSgnFIJKY08&t=242s

Transcript- Automatically generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 65, Interview with Dr. Howard Schubiner. 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. I have Dr. Howard Schubiner on the program today, which is very awesome.
Hey, Howard.
Hello.
Welcome. And Dr. Schubiner, Howard, he lets us call him, is a pioneer in the mind-body world. You got started working with John Sarno, right?
Back in the day, a bit.
So he's been in the mind-body field for a long time and done a lot of research, currently a professor at Michigan State and has written Unlearn Your Pain, a 28-day process to reprogram your brain and then also unlearn your anxiety and depression. I attended the virtual retreat that you did a couple months ago, and it was for medical professionals to help us understand neural circuit pain, which is either you could call it neurogenic or neuroplastic or TMS or mind-body. And it really, the way that you presented, first of all, how you describe pain, I think is awesome.
And then the criterion you have for determining if something is neural circuit or not, I found so helpful. So maybe we could start by you describing pain, how you would to a patient that comes with you with back pain or something.
Yeah, that's a good place to start. And that's what I do with all my patients. And what I say is that you can't understand pain unless you understand how the brain works.
And then I say, well, the brain works by something called predictive coding. Our brains are designed to keep us safe. And so our brains have these mechanisms for balancing our salt and water intake and keeping us upright and balanced and everything.
But our brain also has this really important danger signal. And if it feels we're in danger, it's going to alert us and alarm us to keep us safe. And that's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
It's really good at it. So our brain, and that's one thing. And the second thing is our brain actually generates what we experience.
So we don't see with our eyes, which seems odd. We see with our brain. We see the visual cortex.
Light comes in our eyes, but we don't see anything unless our brain interprets that light and creates the image. And sometimes the images that our brain creates are not what our eyes are actually seeing.
And we even have that spot where the optic nerve connects, that we don't actually have vision, but our brain just fills it in, the blind spot.
That's a great, great point. And with hearing, our ear, our brain creates what we actually hear. And sometimes we hear stuff that's not there.
How many people have heard their name called when someone wasn't calling their name? And what we feel, how many times have people felt their cell phone vibrating in their pocket when it actually wasn't? And so our brain creates what we experience.
And if our brain feels we're in danger, it's going to create something to alarm us and alert us. And our brain has this very interesting quirk that a physical injury can activate pain, but an emotional injury can activate the exact same pain. And the pain is the same because all pain is generated by the brain.
And you can have an injury and not have pain because pain is a decision that the brain makes. So once people understand that, then we can begin to understand, we can begin to explore with them and investigate their situation. And if their brain is creating pain or if their body is generating pain signals or dangerous signals in the body, or if it's a combination of the two.
Yeah, so understanding the brain is so important with pain. All pain is real pain, I've heard you say, and all pain is created in the brain. Even if you have a cut finger, the pain is created in the brain.
Correct. Like you say, all pain is real.
And all pain is real.
So people who have who have pain are not crazy. It's not their fault. It's not because they want the pain.
It's not because they're weak. It's because their brain is generating pain. And why would the brain generate pain?
Well, the brain generates pain because it's afraid of something. There's some fear that's going on, something that started the pain in the first place. Maybe it started with an injury.
So the brain was afraid. And the message was rest and get a cast on your arm or whatever. But sometimes if there's an emotional injury at the same time as the physical injury, the danger signal in the brain doesn't turn off when the injury heals.
So the pain continues and people get the impression, sometimes doctors also get the impression, that the injury didn't heal when in fact the injury did heal because all injuries heal. But the neural circuits causing the pain become persistent. And then people begin to not only, their brain might be afraid of some emotional issue in their life, but maybe the emotional issue in their life passes, and that's not an ongoing problem.
Now the person with pain begins to be afraid of the pain itself. Worried about the pain, frustrated about the pain, focusing on the pain and all of that gives feedback to the brain, that yeah, there's something wrong here, which makes the brain feel more in danger, which makes the pain continue or get worse over time or spread over time.
Yeah, and most people go to their doctor and try to find out what is going on at that site, right? Like if it's their back, they would probably have an x-ray or MRI, and if they find some structural damage, then they have even more evidence, you know, evidence that that's what's causing their pain. But maybe we should talk a little bit about the structural damage and whether that actually causes pain or not, as you said, with injuries that have healed.
Right. Well, structural damage can certainly trigger pain, but a lot of people have abnormalities on an x-ray or MRI and not have structural damage. And this is a little bit hard for people to understand.
It's hard for doctors to understand. There was a recent study where they read people's MRIs of their back in two ways. Half the people got the normal reading, which emphasized all the things that were wrong, and the other half of the people got the enlightened reading, which said, look, a lot of people have these, what Dr. Sarno used to call normal abnormalities.
They have these variations that are due to normal aging. And so bulging disc, facet issues, degenerative disc, all those things are common in people starting in their 30s, 20s and 30s even, and they rise with age, and 80, 90% of people in their 50s and 60s have these, who have no pain. And so these findings are not the cause of pain.
An MRI can show something wrong, like an abscess, a tumor, a fracture. It can show an inflammatory condition, like ankylosing spondylitis. It can show a severely huge bulging disc, herniated disc, that is actually pressing on the nerve.
That can happen. But the vast majority of people with back pain don't have any of those things.
Yeah, they have the normal aging process related abnormalities. Just like you might have wrinkles on your face or gray hairs.
Wait a minute.
People might.
What are you talking about here?
I mean, I don't ever have to cover my gray hair, but...
I always say gray hair doesn't hurt. It's normal.
Unless it's emotionally.
When you look in the mirror, it can hurt.
And that's just a great example of our society and how the way that we interpret the changes in our body makes a difference in how we feel.
I always say that aging, I always say that getting older is inevitable. But aging is a state of mind. So we try to.
Yeah, I believe that. I feel a lot younger than people, some in their 30s that are saying, Oh, getting older, my back's always hurting, you know. Like you're 30.
What?
Yeah, so definitely, I think understanding that structural changes are just normal, and that's not the cause of pain, is so huge, and it's this predictive coding. But what if it's something that just happens, like someone threw their back out? How often is that something structural versus this predictive coding showing up someplace new?
Well, people do get injured, and you can injure yourself by a sudden twist or turn. You can injure yourself by overdoing it. But those injuries are quite mild.
These are soft tissue injuries, and all injuries heal. So a fracture bone heals in six weeks, usually, maybe eight weeks. But a soft tissue injury, like an ankle sprain or a pulled back, is going to heal in a matter of days, a matter of a few weeks at most.
And so what we need to realize is that if the pain persists after the normal healing timeframe, then we have to think, well, it's not just the injury that we're dealing with here.
Yeah, and I think I've heard you say, I think in the conference, you did say something like most acute pain can be a neural circuit pain.
Well, sure. I mean, a lot of times we get a headache. If we have a stressful day, that's a neural circuit pain.
You get a stomach ache if you're worried about something. You can get a neck ache again if you know something's going on at work or something's going on in your family. These are acute pains, but they're neural circuit pains because you didn't injure, you didn't actually injure yourself.
It's easy to figure that out, but it's only easy to figure it out if you're aware of the possibility. Most people are not really aware of the possibility that a neck ache would be caused by stress, as opposed to eye strain or how I'm holding my head or how I slept or things like that.
Yeah, I do. I've seen that a lot with physical therapy, too. People have the expectation that it was because of something they did, how they moved, doing too much.
I hear that a lot. Some of the things you said that were interesting to me, as far as things that are not typically causing pain would even include certain foods. So if people are having certain reactions to foods, that's a predictive pattern from the brain and neural circuit.
Yeah, it's really common that people end up getting afraid of foods or alcohol or whatever, because they may have a reaction. Let's say you're having a stressful day and you're eating broccoli. Well, your brain has just connected broccoli with a stress, or broccoli with the stomach pain that you have from the stress, but you happen to be eating broccoli.
So now your brain is making that association, and then broccoli can easily become a conditioned response. So when you eat broccoli, your brain is turning on pain as a trigger. There's nothing to do with the broccoli itself, but then you think it does, so you avoid broccoli.
And the more you avoid broccoli, the more afraid of broccoli you are. And then even smelling broccoli can start to cause some pain. And then that can spread.
You say, oh, I'm allergic to broccoli. And then, you know, you get stomach pain, and then you blame it on wheat, or you blame it on dairy, or you blame it on, you know, meat. And then it just then that can just spiral.
And I've seen a lot of people who are, have constricted their diet so much, they can only eat a couple foods. And it's really, it's just horrible. They're, you know, they're on what I call the fear food diet.
Yeah, that's got to cause a lot of stress too, which just plays into that cycle.
Yeah.
What are the common, like, GI-related, gastrointestinal-related neural circuit issues? I know you've talked about IBS. Yeah, irritable bowel.
That's the most common one. There's something like 20 million people who have this condition in the US anyway. I do.
I mean, so many people have it. It's part of being human that our gut responds to our emotions. So you can get constipated, you can get diarrhea, you can get bloating, you can get stomach pain.
Another condition they call is functional dyspepsia, which just means stomach pain for no reason. A lot of people suffer with GER, gastrointestinal gastroesophageal reflux. And a lot of people have the symptoms of reflux without actually having reflux when they're studied.
But they call it that, and then they take medication, and sometimes the medication may work, but maybe the medication is working as a placebo, and the reflux isn't actually the problem. Reflux does exist. Some people certainly haven't.
And so there's a variety of symptoms that occur in the abdomen. Of course, all the pelvic pain syndromes. Some people have pain in the pelvic area that have, again, go by a whole variety of names, such as pelvic floor dysfunction, ventral corralgia, interstitial cystitis, vulvodynia, coccidinia, all these names that basically mean you have pain, and we don't know why.
Yeah.
I had a graphic in your presentation that said the percentage of these conditions that are brain-induced, and most of them were 90% to 99% brain-induced, and that was irritable bowel, fibromyalgia, headaches, including migraines.
Anxiety and depression.
Anxiety and depression. That's interesting.
Because anxiety and depression, you can have a medical condition causing anxiety like hyperthyroidism.
Okay.
But the vast majority of people with anxiety don't have medical conditions causing them. They have anxiety, again, produced by the brain, by neural circuits in the brain. Same with depression.
Men with very low testosterone levels can be depressed as a medical condition. Not that common.
Like 1% if it's...
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, wow. And so, same with pelvic pain syndromes.
With back pain, you know, it's funny because people would, when you think about it, you say, okay, neurologists know that almost all headaches are not medical conditions, in the sense that they're not due to some underlying structural problem, like some kind of need in the brain, tumor in the brain, vasculitis, ear disease, sinus disease, tooth disease, et cetera. But with back pain, it's the opposite that everyone thinks. Neurologists will say, yeah, almost all back pain is due to a structural problem.
Well, that doesn't make any sense. It's how can 90, 95, let's say, percent of headaches be due to non-structural problems, and 95% of back pain be due to structural problems, chronic pain?
Right.
It really just doesn't make sense. And we've been studying that. And in our Boulder back pain study, 95% of the people that I evaluated who had back pain for an average of 10 years had nothing wrong with their back.
They had minor abnormalities on MRI, as we discussed. The pain was due to neural circuits. And I'm doing a study now, a larger study.
We're going to have roughly 200 people in the study, consecutive people coming in for chronic back and neck pain. And we're evaluating them in a very careful way, as I've been teaching, as you pointed out. And we're finding that about 85% of them don't have a structural problem.
But it really is, especially since people are getting a lot of treatments on the structures and even surgeries and putting so much emphasis on something that's not working.
Yeah, I know. And the treatment then can, of course, be counterproductive.
Yeah.
It can make people worse because it can be invasive. Yeah. And if it doesn't work, it's frustrating.
And the labeling of the problem is being crippling, being incurable, being, you know, I don't know what we can do, or threatening to have surgery, which scares people like crazy, and just fear piling on top of fear, which obviously makes people worse. Yeah.
I mean, I've heard people being told they have the spine of an 80-year-old, and, you know, and they really, you know, that affects people. They think of themselves in that way after that.
Right. It's hard to not share that after you've COVID. And I've had so many people, you know, repeat to me what they're, some of those words that the doctors have said, like, you know, your back looks like, you know, really crippled.
You may never get better. You will probably have to live with this the rest of your life. These are really scary statements.
Medical cursing. I've heard it called.
Yeah, that's a good...
But as a physical therapist, you know, I understand, like, you try to explain these things as best you can. And it was interesting to me to hear you say things like, you know, the leg length discrepancies, the weak core muscles, the muscular imbalances, joint instability, even inflammation doesn't cause pain.
Right. We are doing a lot of work with teaching physical therapists and people who do manual medicine, like chiropractors and osteopaths. We're doing a lot of work in trying to help them unlearn some of these ideas and concepts that they have been taught are the cause of chronic pain when they're just normal variations.
Yeah.
Inflammation is really an interesting situation because, and I've written about this a bit, but people fail, I think, to distinguish what I would call macro-inflammation from micro-inflammation. Macro-inflammation or localized inflammation can certainly be the cause of pain. Rheumatoid arthritis can cause inflamed joints.
Lupus can cause inflamed joints that can be hot and red and swollen and tender, and you can see them. It's macro-inflammation. Having a strep throat is macro-inflammation.
You can see it, and it clearly trigger pain. On the other hand, micro-inflammation is often blamed for chronic pain because you can't see it. It's supposedly there, and it's true that everyone has micro-inflammation.
There's inflammation in our gums. There's inflammation in our arteries. It's a micro-inflammation, and that inflammation doesn't cause pain.
My gums don't hurt. But yes, there's inflammation there. I have to keep flossing to keep the inflammation down.
But it's there. There's inflammation in our arteries. And that's where another layer of fear tends to come in, where people say you have to fight inflammation, and what they mean is you have to fight micro-inflammation.
And fighting micro-inflammation, for example, by, let's say, meditating, having a healthy diet, going vegan. You know, these are great things. I am all in favor of that.
And maybe it will make your life better. Maybe it will make you live longer. It probably will.
I have no doubt about that. But that has nothing to do with chronic pain. Okay, that's the distinction that I will make.
But, you know, when people get afraid to have potato chips, because it's going to cause inflammation, it's going to cause them pain, then they're back into that pain-fear pain cycle.
So if it's... This is kind of my theory. If it's moderate, like, we're designed as humans, we can withstand a little bit of sugar.
You know, it's not crippling to our system. And like you said, it's... Maybe a potato chip isn't going to cause that inflammation, or we already have inflammation, and so it's, you know, just...
We've been told that we have to avoid these things to avoid this inflammation, to fight it, where we do have the capacity to kind of metabolize a decent amount of...
Well, I do.
I might just be justifying eating candy here, but for me, it makes sense that, you know, unless our diet is purely candy, you know, we can handle some of that.
I agree with that. And it's... And we have to take care of our mental health, too.
Yes. You know, I mean, you know, a piece of cake every now and then is kind of good for birthdays. You know, it's kind of good for our mental health, I think.
And, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but...
Well, I think we all can, right, decide for ourselves. Like, maybe someone is a lot happier not eating sugar, and that feels good to them. But if it doesn't work for you and you're trying to fit into that, then that's going to cause you a little more mental anguish.
And just eat your cake and enjoy it. If you're choosing to eat it, then just love it, enjoy it, savor it.
Yeah. Yeah, someone, one of my patients, gave me a book this week. I think it's called A Boy, A Fox, A Mole, and A Horse.
It's a beautiful, beautiful little book. And it's filled with wisdom. One of the pages, it says something like, is there a school for unlearning?
And I was showing it to my wife and she said, yeah, you have that school, Howard. I mean, that's your school for unlearning, right?
Yeah, it really is.
It has this great stuff in this book. And it's one of the questions they say, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? And the mole says, kind.
And it's just beautiful, right? Anyway, so what made me think of it is the mole, they ask him something like, well, what's your favorite thing in the world? And he goes, cake.
So sweet, so simple, so joyful. Like, I think a lot of us as humans have a hard time even enjoying ourselves, like really being happy. We say all the time that we want to be happy, but do you find that people have a hard time even leaning into those positive emotions?
Only adults.
Adults, yeah, right.
Kids tend not to have a problem with that, but, you know, kids grow up quicker, and, you know, teenagers, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression in teenagers, skyrocketing rates of pain in teenagers as we adultify them and put pressure on them, and social media pressure, and all sorts of things. But, you know, part of the treatment of a mind-body disorder or a neurocircuit disorder is to play more. I tell my patients, there's three L's you need to do more of.
Living, loving, and laughing. And how trite and, you know, silly is that? But it's completely true, because that's one of the ways you change the neurocircuits in your brain, out of this pattern of fear and worry and frustration and fighting all the time to a place of joy and ease and grace and calm.
And, you know, we have to live our lives that way. You know, life is too short.
Yeah.
We live at being fearful all the time. And it's not to minimize people's stress and the hardships that so many people go through.
Right. And there is going to be some pain as part of life. But sometimes we don't accept the pleasure either.
We deny ourselves the pleasure, or we think somehow it's dangerous to allow ourselves to be happy.
Yeah.
As far as the history that you find with people, I know that sometimes people have some very traumatic things in their childhood. Other people don't seem to have that. There are definitely personality traits that play into it.
What in your mind are kind of the biggest factors that contribute, other than being a human and having a brain?
Well, your point is very well taken, because all humans get neural circuit pain, all humans have stress, all humans react to it. Our brain is always there as a danger signal, alerting us if there's something that's wrong. But clearly, people who have had childhood trauma, if they had a lot of difficulties in their life, their brain tends to become more sensitive to stress.
And so their danger signal may be set at a more sensitive level, so it may take less stress in them to trigger headaches or back pain or anxiety or fatigue compared to somebody else. And I was just talking to a young woman today who I, you know, we admitted that she's a perfect people pleaser.
Yeah, so many people are, and it's not a bad trait to want to be nice to other people and please other people. But when you take it to such an extreme where you negate yourself and you don't stand up for yourself, that's a disability. And that's something that that's part of the message that her pain is giving her is part of the message and part of the growth and learning that she can do from this and seeing her pain as a gift, really, to help her be a stronger and more confident person, is to start to dial some of that people pleasing back and to practice saying this, you know, what I always say, the magic word that starts with an N and ends with an O and only has two letters can be.
Yeah, that's it's a hard word to say. Sometimes I heard Brene Brown saying, you can just say no without giving an explanation. And that was like impossible for me.
I'm like, I'll at least try to not like make a white lie. But I want to like give some explanation. It's crazy how ingrained that is in me.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was just talking about with her an hour ago. It's just exactly that. You don't have to say, you know, well, I can't because of X, Y, and Z.
You can just say, no, I can't.
Yeah, you have to have that boundary. You have to have that self-care. You have to have that, you know, compassion for yourself and say no.
If you're giving it your own expense.
Yeah, exactly. And so people who have had, you know, trauma in their life often have learned to not be kind to themselves. And so to enhance that is, you know, it's a really important part of the treatment process.
And so the pain is signaling to them. Something's got to change. There's some danger here.
And it's not necessarily the danger of, you know, something that you did too much and you move too much. But you've got to change something else. You can't keep living this way and thinking this way.
It's painful.
Right. Right. So we start, you know, we start the treatment process with a deep and clear understanding of the brain and pain, fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety, that the brain is creating these things in everyone at different times, and then investigate their own situation carefully, looking for the details that would rule in or rule out a neural circuit problem.
The last thing we want to do is miss a true structural problem. That's, you know, that's horrible. And occasionally it happens, but we try, you know, so hard to minimize that.
But it's usually not that hard, you know, because people get routine medical testing and they don't find anything. And we can rule in a neural circuit problem by the fact of the characteristics of the situation, the fact that when the pain came on, what was going on in your life, or the fact that did you have these personality traits? Do you have lots of pain in different places?
Have you had lots of these other mind-body type symptoms? And most importantly, does the pain shift from one place to the other? Does the pain move?
Does it turn on and off? Does it go away when you're on vacation? Is it triggered by the wind or by cold or by rain?
Is it triggered by stress? Is it triggered by foods? All these innocuous things that actually show us and the brain is actually showing us, well, look, it's me, I'm doing this.
Oh, I like that way. The brain is showing us that by these patterns.
Exactly. Right. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's in one, one wrist and it goes to the other.
It's well, I, I thought I injured my right wrist, but I didn't do anything to the left wrist. Why did the pain jump over there? He's going like, hello.
Yeah. I mean, as physical therapists, we'd say like, oh, you must be compensating. You know, you're probably just, you're using this wrist more now, or, you know, with the back, we could always say it up and down the line.
Oh, your, your shoulder. Well, your back, you're probably twisting, you know, but it's just your brain.
Yeah, it's so simple. And once you understand this dynamic, now you can't not see that. Once you really understand it.
So I'm working with a physiatrist, a PM&R doctor, great, great guy who went, who's doing standard PM&R practice, seeing tons of back pain, doing tons of injections, thinking it was all structural. And he went to a lecture and the lecture said, you know, there's a mind-body connection here. Look closely.
And he started looking closely. And he's like, wait a minute. The closer I look, the more I see.
It just doesn't add up. He had a great, he had an amazing case the other day, told me about. He had a patient with kind of an older guy who's like a manual laborer, works really hard, you know, been working using his back and his muscles his whole life.
He's got this severe low back pain. It's there all the time. It doesn't vary and never changes, never goes away.
He's got severe spinal stenosis on his MRI. And my friend who is very well aware of the mind body connection thought this was a structural problem. Okay, so the spinal stenosis is causing all these nerve roots to be compressed, supposedly on the MRI, but yet he doesn't have leg pain.
If the nerves are actually compressed, you would expect leg pain, right? Well, he didn't have.
And a certain distribution too, right?
Yes, and a certain distribution, the back of the leg, side of the leg, etc. That's one nerve root, L5. He didn't have any leg pain.
Okay, well, so but then, but he's got these nerve root compressions, so we'll do epidural injections. So he gets three epidural injections twice, doesn't do anything. Okay, so what's with that?
And then he say, well, we'll do these medial branch blocks. So medial branch blocks are injections in the facet joints. Well, the facet joints don't do anything to the nerve roots.
The facet joints have to do with basically arthritis of the spine. So the injections are lidocaine. So the lidocaine is going to go in and it's going to cure the problem if the problem is inflammation in those facet joints.
But it's only going to cure the problem for four to seven hours because the lidocaine is going to wear away, wear off. So this guy gets these facet joints and within an hour, he's fine. He's like totally fine.
Totally fine.
Totally fine, pain gone. So that could be the efficacy of the lidocaine. So the guy comes back to see him a week later.
He's totally fine.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The lidocaine went off six and a half days ago.
Why are you fine now? And he's like, guess what? This was not a structural problem.
And he still does manual labor, right? He's still doing his job.
Yeah, he's still working.
Yeah, he's fine.
It's been a month now. The guy's fine for the last month. From this one lidocaine injection.
That's a placebo effect.
Yeah. And it's so interesting because it's like, you know, sometimes people hear about this work and they're like, okay, so I have to like, journal every day, and I have to get into my childhood trauma, and I have to like, aren't there just like hundreds of different ways people find that are their own unique answers?
Absolutely. I am very leery of one size fits all.
Yeah.
If you read my books, yeah, there's a program there, but my advice is don't do it.
Don't do all of it.
Pick and choose what you need. But don't get locked into, don't be constrained to feel like you have to do everything, because now you're people-pleasing. Now you're being obsessive and you're increasing fear.
If I don't write every day, my pain will come back. Well, that's not true.
That's the fear energy that's perpetuating your pain.
So, you know, I don't start with the emotional processing work. I do that more toward later. And again, only if people need it, and only to whatever degree they need it.
Yeah, some with just the education, that alone gets rid of their pain. And I've seen this even with someone with childhood trauma that in the course of six months, we never even talked about once, but within four weeks of her learning about her back pain and believing something different, her back pain was gone.
Yeah, I saw a woman yesterday, incredible, horrible, not only childhood trauma, but then incredible trauma from an abusive, severely abusive husband for, I don't know, seven or eight years, something like that. Now, she's out of that relationship, but she has a ton of pain, you know, pain level eight, you know, eight out of ten all the time. You know, it's been going on for 20 years.
So I saw her yesterday. I'd seen her one week before. How are you doing now?
Well, my pain's at three now. In one week? Yeah, she didn't do any emotional processing of all that.
You just educated her on neural circuits.
Right, and start the process of separating from the pain. Start the process of not fighting it, not fixing it. Start the process of not fearing it.
How do you suggest when someone's in an eight out of ten pain?
How do you suggest?
Starting that process of not fearing it.
Well, step by step. Just a little bit. Just doing the process.
If you took the course that I teach, I demonstrated what I've been calling provocative testing. I'm starting to call it neural circuit testing now. But anyway, help trying to demonstrate to people in real time that these neural circuits can change.
I've used that a lot, actually, since that time. What are you finding?
I had a woman that she was convinced. Her doctor had told her her knee arthritis was so bad. She needed a knee replacement.
In fact, I wanted to ask you about this, because she did have swelling in that knee. And so she used that as justification of like, it's got to be a structural cause of the pain. But she said the worst thing was standing up from a chair.
So she stood up and she rated it a certain number. And then she sat there, and I had her just go into her body, calm down for just a second, and feel her knee and imagine doing that. And she had the exact same amount of pain.
Most people, it's less or there's a twinge. She had the exact same amount of pain, imagining it.
And how did she react to that when you pointed out that that was her brain?
It was still a lot of disbelief. And I mean, she was silent. I find people are silent for a good amount of time.
Do you see that, where they're just like, when they imagine it, and then they're just like, wow. And she's reached out to me again, and she is interested in exploring it more. But I think what her doctor told her, she really felt like she was almost, this is what I thought, maybe being negligent, if she didn't take care of that damage that was there, even though I just proved to her her brain was causing that.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many variations of this, and that's what makes the practice great, because you know how people respond, different people respond differently.
But what about that knee? How would you like, someone does say like, but look, the swelling is just in the knee, it's warm to the touch.
Yeah. Well, I mean, there, you know, there's not to say that she doesn't have some arthritis there. And number one, the brain can cause swelling.
I've seen that. Number two, arthritis can cause swelling, but maybe the pain she's having is way out of line with the amount of arthritis that she actually has. And research shows that when you compare x-rays of people's knees and hips, et cetera, the x-rays are not perfectly correlated with the amount of pain that people have.
There's a great degree of mis-correlation between how much findings are in the x-ray and how much pain, if any, people have. So we work with people where they're at, but if she's imagining standing up causes pain, there's definitely a component, if not the complete component, of her brain doing this. And then what we would do, of course, is try to see if that makes sense.
If that makes sense to her, that it's her brain, or at least a significant component of her brain, then we can calm her, have her do some affirmations, tell herself she's okay, and imagine, and then imagine standing up while she's repeating in her mind to herself, I'm safe, I'm not in danger. Safe, I'm not in danger. And imagine standing up again.
Yeah.
See what happens this time. And usually the pain will decrease or even go away with the imagine standing up. So imagining is a graded exposure, just a very low level of exposure.
She's not even standing up. But if you can show her that changing her mindset from fear and danger to safety and calm changes the amount of discomfort she has with imagining standing, that's showing her that she can change her neural circuit. And then, of course, you can have her do the same process of affirmations, imagining, not imagining, but telling herself she's okay, she's okay, smiling, joy, and then actually stand up with that in her mind.
And sometimes you see amazing things. And that's what happened with the thing I was telling you about who went from the eighth level to the three in one week, because this neural circuit testing showed her that it was really her brain and she gained much more confidence and could relax more.
Yes.
And her brain could relax more and her pain went away.
Yes. And I love how you described like that feeling of safety. So it's not just kind of like thinking, thoughts, that you're safe.
Like the kind of visceral somatic relaxation.
Yeah. Yeah. And exactly.
And trying to bring in a smile, trying to tell a little joke, trying to bring in the beauty of just breathing, the joy of breathing, the joy of imagining standing up, the joy of imagining walking. I was talking to working with a woman this week who used to be a runner, but now she can't run. So part of our treatment was having her imagining running with joy, right?
Imagine running with the wind blowing through her hair.
It was just beautiful.
And she really responded to that on, like you say, a visceral level to help change the neural circuits in her brain.
Yes. Number one way to rewire our brain, right, is to react with that calm, that safety. And since I went to your course, I've been telling myself that I'm safe.
In all of these situations that I, you know, my cognitive brain is like, this is really fascinating, interesting. I never would have thought I felt unsafe. But how much that changes my body physiology and allows me to relax.
You know, even in yoga, I'll sometimes feel some sensation. And just telling my wrist it's safe goes right away.
Even in doing a podcast?
In doing a podcast that I'm safe? No, honestly, though, I do with all of the things, because I think my body at a fundamental level is scared of like doing things wrong and making mistakes. And I kind of think it's my upbringing, you know, my religious background, but probably most people have their own version of how they don't feel safe, right?
Yeah, yeah, we all have had times when we didn't feel safe. And the key, I think, is using those times to help us grow and help us learn to be more stress-hardy, right? Because research shows that it's not the amount of stress necessarily.
I mean, there's obviously extremes, but it's not the amount of stress necessarily that causes problems. It's our perception of if we can handle it or not. And Victor Frankl taught us that in his book from the 50s, Man's Search for Meaning, where he made it through a concentration camp by focusing on love, by focusing on caring, by focusing on feeling that he had some ability to control his situation, even in a situation where there's virtually no control, to see his surroundings as a challenge, as an opportunity to grow and become a better human being.
I mean, it's an amazing, amazing book, an amazing person. But we all can do that in our own little ways with our own situations, I think.
Yes, we're always presented with some of these situations, right? Like, that's part of life. A pain-free life doesn't exist.
That's not humanity. But seeing that pain is opportunities to grow.
And an emotion-free life is not an option. Emotions aren't dangerous, and we can learn to accept and tolerate our emotions. We can learn to express them in safe and healthy ways.
I often think that kids on their bedroom should have a little whiteboard that has three columns. One that says things that make me mad, things that make me sad, and things that make me glad. And they can learn that it's okay to be angry, and it's okay to be sad, and so it's great to be happy.
Yeah.
Get stuff down.
Right. I don't know.
I just think it's a good idea.
I think it's a great idea. I love that. Because, yeah, I think we don't talk a lot about our emotions.
We're just kind of taught, like, you should be happy all the time, and if not, take a pill for it. So it's definitely interesting, and especially where I think there was a study you referenced where, or maybe you did, where the type of treatment, the emotional recognition, was it, treatment? What is it called?
Emotional awareness and experience.
Is more effective than the cognitive behavioral therapy and some of the current treatments that are the gold standard?
Correct. Yeah, we did that study when people with fibromyalgia, and it was one of the first, if not the first study, to show that one psychological intervention for chronic pain was actually superior to a different psychological intervention.
And that intervention is recognized by the US. Government Health and Human Services Department as a recognized treatment for chronic pain. So we're happy with that.
And my colleague Mark Lumley is a brilliant psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, who was really the person who wrote the grant and got us the money to do that cool study.
Congratulations on that. That is huge. And it's emotional awareness and expression and expression therapy.
So it's probably like it sounds. The emphasis is on being aware of your emotions, expressing them.
Right. And we learned this from from Dr. Alan Avis, the psychiatrist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who is a brilliant researcher, clinician and teacher of the form of therapy that we used as a basis for this, which is intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. So the acronym is ISTDP.
And Alan teaches this all around the world, and it's really a very powerful and useful way of helping people deal with emotions.
Hmm, yeah, definitely the emotion pain line is very blurry. It's kind of a continuum, right?
All together. They're all in there together. Physical pain causes emotional pain, and emotional pain can cause physical pain.
Yes. Well, we are about to wrap up. I just have one more question for you that was from one of my clients, if that's okay.
She's a physician, and I think she heard you talking about psychedelics and research. And the benefits that we've been seeing. And she was concerned as far as like, there's already this opioid epidemic.
Isn't this just introducing something else that's equally as dangerous?
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, the research on psychedelics, of course, goes back to the 1950s. There's no evidence that these these agents are addicted.
That's pretty interesting.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, and it's kind of important to know. There's strong evidence now and growing evidence that they can be very beneficial in the setting of therapy. They're not always beneficial in the non-therapeutic setting.
So using them recreationally, I mean, it's been fine. People have been doing it for generations. Native people have been using psychedelics for hundreds of years.
Mostly, they're doing them also in therapeutic settings, religious kind of ceremony type settings. And so we're not, I don't think anyone's really advocating widespread chronic use of psychedelics throughout the population. But they are, they can be mind opening in the right setting with the right mindset in short term use, not long term use, and definitely not, and since they're not addictive, and they don't, they don't, you know, have side effects.
I mean, you can have, you can, you can go into a lot of fear and you can go panic reaction during one of these psychedelic journeys for sure. But if you're in a safe place, that can be managed. If you're not in a safe place, that could be harmful.
So you have to be careful with that for sure. But what we're talking about with mind body medicine is using the natural chemistry of our brain to heal ourselves. The power of the placebo to heal ourselves, it's using the power of hope and love and optimism and knowledge and calmness and awe and joy.
It's using those to heal us. And those are powerful chemicals. Yeah.
Joe Dispenza talks about this pharmacy that we have in our own heads.
Absolutely.
Yeah. So yeah, by cultivating different thoughts and emotions on purpose, we're really creating different chemicals in our body. Yeah.
All right.
Well, very cool. I really appreciate your time. It's really been a pleasure talking to you.
And I think this will really help a lot of people. And your information is so valuable and needed and respected. So thank you.
Thanks, Betsy. It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Anytime. Have a great day. Me too.

Episode #64- Internal Pressure

Chances are, if you have chronic pain or disease, you are also the type of person that puts a lot of pressure on yourself.

 

We tend to put more pressure on ourselves than anyone else puts on us, and often we have a higher expectation of ourselves compared to others.

 

Constantly feeling like we should be different, creates a state of internal pressure.

 

I talk about the pressure we put on ourselves in 3 main categories: how we behave, how we feel, and pressure with time.

 

Listen here for more about the types of pressure we put on ourselves, and how to let it go so we can create more flow in life.

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

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Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

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Episode #63- You Are Safe

The number one way to rewire your brain when you have chronic pain or stress is to FEEL SAFE.  Like in your body, at a somatic level.  Especially if you can react to sensations neutrally, calmly, this signals your brain and nervous system to calm down so you can heal.

In this episode I explain about the nervous system and why we might feel unsafe.  Even if you aren't aware of conscious thoughts you have, you can use your body cues to realize times you are subconsciously not feeling safe.

I also share several strategies to feel more safe, so you can start calming yourself when you notice pain, stress or symptoms.

If you are in chronic fight or flight, listen up- this episode is for you!

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

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Episode #62- This Is Just Like Before

Our brains are always trying to make meaning.  And when we have a new pain or flare up, I have noticed many of us tend to look at our past to make sense of it.

 

The way we react to pain will make a difference in whether our pain is amplified or decreased.  So if we react with fear and stress, this actually causes our brain to PRODUCE more pain.  

 

When we compare current symptoms to the pain, anxiety or depression we felt  before, we can cause a fearful state.  We basically freak ourselves out!  Which causes more pain.  

 

Most of the time, pain is caused by past stressors (childhood or early adulthood), present stressors, perfectionism, or people pleasing (wanting to be seen as good). NOT by structural injuries as we have always been taught.

 

Our past does not have to predict our future.

 

You can look at these signs from your body as a warning signal or call to attention.  What could you change in your thoughts or environment?  Do you need to create some boundaries, give yourself rest, or change old thought patterns that are causing you mental stress?  Pain is a danger signal, but it is our job to interpret what it is really saying.

 

The main key when in pain, is to calm yourself.  Decrease the nervous system from fight or flight to rest and repair so your body can heal.  So be on to yourself if you catch yourself thinking- this is just like before!

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

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Episode #61- Embodiment

Embodiment is to become connected with ourselves, mentally, emotionally and physically.

There are many reasons we become dissociated from our bodies- programming to ignore our body cues, to hate and even to fear our bodies. 

Usually we only pay attention to our bodies when there is pain or discomfort.

When there is pain, being in the body is not comfortable.  So the thought of focusing in on the body and the pain could seem counterintuitive.

But in the process of embodiment, you learn to know your body's cues and can even change your pain.

How do you become more embodied?  Listen to find out more!

 

Muscle Testing Videos:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMImx8zh_Pf/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CL0BSFhhoRM/

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543