Pain is never fun.
I just wanted to say that right off the bat. It sucks. It sucks hard. Developing effective strategies for dealing with pain are as varied as the individuals who are experiencing it. What works for one person does not always work for another. Which can make trying to find ways to cope with pain frustrating and discouraging because it can be a very time-consuming trial and error process. With the current opioid crisis, many are trying to find other ways of dealing with their pain than with drugs. And considering that research shows that medications for pain really aren’t all that effective anyway, a combination approach to your pain management strategy is probably in your best interest.
I’ve found with my patients that they’ve heard a lot of the usual tips before, but because no one has taken the time to fully explain why some of these techniques are beneficial, they don’t bother with them. “This isn’t the kind of pain that deep breathing will help,” I hear a lot. Well, have you tried it? The usual answer is no. So, okay, let me explain some science for you.
Diaphragmatic breathing - this is the kind of breathing that pushes out your abdomen first before expanding your thorax. This technique is effective for a number of reasons, but one of the most important and often overlooked aspects is that it switches off your stress response. The same way that faking a smile can trick your brain into thinking you are happy, deep breathing with your diaphragm tricks your brain into thinking you are relaxed. Why is this important? Being relaxed changes the way we perceive pain. Also, if you are recovering from an injury or illness, the more time you spend in your rest and digest parasympathetic mode, the faster you’ll heal. Since tissue healing and repair only occurs in your parasympathetic response mode, the more time you spend in that physiologic response, the quicker you’ll recover. This is one of the many reasons why stress can be so detrimental to your health and why chronically stressed people have poorer recovery times and get sick or injured more often. It literally affects the state of your tissue health. And like over-exercising and not giving your muscles proper time to heal between workouts, not taking the time to switch out of your stress response mode weakens your system overall, making it more prone to tissue damage and less able to heal it when it happens, prolonging pain and leading to chronic and repetitive strain injuries.
This leads into meditation and mindfulness training - the above explanation also helps to explain why these practices are so effective at controlling pain and why they are being included in treatment programs for cancer, chronic pain conditions, etc. The more you can train your system to have a proper balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic responses, the healthier your system will be overall, and the quicker you’ll recover from an injury should one happen. A great exercise is to focus on the areas of your body that aren’t in pain. This works because over time you are retraining the pathways in your brain that the information you want to pay attention to is anything other than the pain signal. So your brain will, over time, naturally pay less attention to pain signals in favour of non-painful stimuli. The same goes for mindfully noticing your pain from a detached state. Often times it’s the emotional reaction to the pain signal that can be worse than the pain itself. Learning non-attachment allows you to notice the signal without emotional involvement. And when you can uncouple your pain from your emotional response to pain, you can appreciate pain for what it is - a signaling mechanism. Your body is trying to tell you something using the only language it has. What’s it trying to say? Is your pain trying to protect you from a stressful home or work life? Is there underlying chronic inflammation from an improper diet? Or a repetitive strain injury that needs to be dealt with? Find out what your body needs and then the signal can stop.
Find your triggers - this is also why it’s so important to really look at and rethink some of the things in your life that might be contributing to your overall stress levels preventing your healing. For instance, if your job is super stressful, make sure you are making adequate time in your home life to balance it with taking care of yourself and spending time in your parasympathetic state. Taking up yoga or a meditation practice, for example, can go a long way towards preventing chronic pain injuries. Often times people dealing with chronic pain conditions find that changing jobs or leaving a toxic relationship ‘magically’ helps their pain. It’s not magic. It’s science. It just means their bodies were finally able to switch into their parasympathetic mode and actually heal.
Think with your archaic brain - the parts of our brain that know how to deal with pain are pre-verbal, archaic parts. That’s the idea behind ‘silent births’ and why when you’re in pain you want to punch someone in the face for talking to you. Making sense of language pulls you out into the newer, cortical parts of your brain, the ‘thinking’ brain. This part of our brain is there to focus on pain, not ignore it. So how can you get in touch with your archaic brain? Limit conversation. Listen to music without lyrics. Go to your happy place inside your head and ask others to respect your need to be there.
Make a plan to deal with the pain - ever notice that the day of your appointment to see your doctor, massage therapist or physiotherapist, your pain lessons or goes away entirely? It’s because that part of your brain that is paying attention to that pain signal knows that you’re about to do something to take the pain away. It’s a similar effect as the placebo effect, but just slightly different. So make a plan and then take steps to deal with it. Make an appointment with a health professional who can help you figure out what the underlying reasons for your pain might be and how to help you get that signal to finally turn off.