Experiencing pain for months on end can be incredibly frustrating, especially when it starts to impact your ability to move around. Ironically, exercise is proven effective for alleviating chronic pain—and being too sedentary is associated with a host of additional problems like muscle loss, fat gain, and depressed mood.
The question is, how can we start moving when we’re too afraid of hurting more?
I don’t want anyone stuck in this trap. To help you break free of your discomfort, here are three interesting things you might know about pain:
1. Pain Does Not Always Equal Tissue Damage
Most of us assume—or are told by well-meaning healthcare providers—that pain always indicates some sort of underlying tissue damage. Many of us also assume that more pain means more tissue damage.
But decades of research suggest this isn’t always true. In fact, many people experience chronic debilitating pain long after their initial injury heals!
One explanation for this is that following an initial injury, some individuals’ nervous systems remain overly sensitive. It’s as if a person’s “alarm system” (which is intended to protect them) now has a lower activation threshold, making it easier to “trip” the alarm in the future.
To help make sense of this phenomenon, here’s a hypothetical situation I’ve paraphrased from leading pain education researcher Adriaan Louw, PT, PhD, CSMT:
Imagine you step on a nail. Hundreds of nerves, which carry small amounts of electricity, will activate your body’s “alarm system,” sending a signal from your foot, through the spinal cord, and to the brain to let you know there is immediate danger. This danger message can trigger your brain to produce pain. Thanks to your ability to feel pain, you’ll know right away that there’s a nail in your foot—and you’ll stop to take it out!
For most people, once they remove the nail from their foot, their body’s “alarm system” will gradually calm back down to its normal resting level, usually over the course of a few days. But in some people, their alarm system will stay heightened. This means it takes smaller amounts of external stimuli, stress, or movement to re-activate the alarm system in the future and trigger the brain to produce more pain. The result? You continue to feel pain even though you are no longer actually in “danger.”
2. Our Beliefs and Mindset Influence Our Pain
Just think about it:
If you believe pain always means tissue damage and danger, it’s understandable that you might be reluctant to move or scared of your pain in general—and fearing pain can make it feel even that much worse. Plus, when we are in a state of fear, lots of other changes happen within our bodies that can perpetuate pain—we take shallow breaths, we tense up, we release stress hormones, and so on.
On the other hand, if you view pain as a signal from your body to respect and listen to, but one that is ultimately trying to keep you safe, your experience of pain might not be as negative as someone else’s.
Let me be clear: I am NOT trying to say that your pain is not real, not important, or “all in your head.” Pain is a very real thing! But leading-edge science shows us that our beliefs and mindset can have a dramatic influence on the duration and intensity of the pain we feel.
This is great news, by the way, because we can change our beliefs and mindsets! How do we do this? Through education and awareness.
3. Learning About Pain Can Help Your Pain Go Away
When healing from your chronic pain, it can be useful to learn about anatomy, mechanisms of injury, safe movement patterns, and related topics. But at ITR Physical Therapy, we also strive to help people learn about how pain actually works. Here’s why:
Decades of peer-reviewed research show that when people learn about the neuroscience of pain, they experience:
- Decreased pain
- Improved mobility, movement quality, and muscle function
- Reduced fear of movement and exercise
- Decreased stress
- Reduced spending on excessive medical tests and treatments
- Calmer nervous systems that shift away from the perpetual “fight or flight” activation patterns (scientists can actually see this on brain scans)
I don’t know about you, but I find it INCREDIBLY motivating to know that simply learning more about how my body works can literally change the way my body moves and feels!
Learn About Pain—And Leave It Behind
If you’d like to experience empowering education and a range of effective pain relief services, contact ITR Physical Therapy at 301-770-7060 to schedule an appointment in McLean VA or Bethesda MD.