During our Healthy Backs for Life class last week, the topic of pain came up again. It made me realise how little we understand about pain.
Pain is 100% produced by the Brain.
The normal response I get to this is… but it’s my back that hurts, my hip, my knee etc. Just to clarify, pain can be felt in any/all areas of your body but it is produced in the brain.
How do you think an anaesthetic works?
So, just to be clear ALL pain, no matter the type – sharp, dull, throbbing – and no matter how long, acute or chronic pain is produced in the brain.
Acute pain (under 3 months) usually occurs because of tissue damage, i.e sprained ankle, the tissue repairs and the pain goes away.
The problems start with Chronic pain (over 3 months): assuming there is nothing serious going on, tissue damage will have repaired by 3-6 months and if you are still feeling pain, then it’s not from tissue damage, but because your brain keeps producing pain.
So, the cause is no longer tissue damage, but sensitivity of the nervous system.
How then do we help people who have chronic pain?
We need to look at all these different areas:
Medical
Medicines can help to a limited extent, they can help get us going again, think of it as a ‘window of opportunity’ to start moving again.
Thoughts/Emotions
Being in chronic pain can affect our moods, our stress levels, our perceptions on how serious our condition is, our perceptions on what we can and cannot do. Learning to calm down our nervous system can help reduce pain. Meditation, Pilates, understanding that the amount of pain you’re suffering is NOT directly proportional to the damage done. There are lots of ways to calm our nervous system down.
Diet and Lifestyle
We can look at how we are living our lives. If we smoke, drink lots of alcohol, eat lots of junk, processed food, don’t drink enough water – all these have a direct effect on your pain levels. The first thing I say to people who come to me with chronic low back pain (LBP) is to look at their diet; most are usually dehydrated, imagine how that manifests itself? Try drinking 3 litres of water a day and eliminating alcohol, nicotine, sugar, gluten, processed foods, caffeine from your diet – your pain levels will decrease. Lifestyle, if you have an office job, then come home and watch TV all night long – yep, that too will increase your pain. We are simply not designed to sit down for hours each day.
Go Deeper
Go back to when the pain occurred, was it a time of particular stress? Had something changed in your life. The two can often be linked.
Exercise
It’s so important to get moving again at a comfortable level without fear and where your brain does not protect by producing more pain. Pilates is wonderful for this, but equally so is walking, just make sure that you do something and get yourself moving again 🙂
So, when we say Pain is only ever in the Brain – it’s true, but we are not saying it because we think it’s in your imagination, of course it’s not, but by understanding all of the above, it gives you the power to start to get your pain levels down by calming down your nervous system, and that’s what we are all after.