Stress! I talk about stress a lot because it really does impact our pain. I know that you know all the PT exercises and the foam rolling tricks and the stretches to help you deal with your pain. Because you are already so good at all that, I want to give you more tools to help your pain, even if it feels indirect.
To me, it seems to make sense that people experiencing chronic pain would like to reduce it. There are a number of lifestyle changes, such as mild aerobic exercise and regular relaxation exercises, which, when done over time can reduce pain. Some medications, such as tricyclic antidepressants and antiepileptics, have been shown to reduce pain, also. However, these treatments are only effective to a point. We really don’t have any treatments that are super effective for chronic pain. Procedures, such as injection therapies and spine surgeries, are known to be largely ineffective, despite how often they are pursued. While some of the things that can be done to reduce chronic pain are helpful, they have a limited capacity.
Possibilities…
It’s possible to have chronic pain and not have it disrupt your life.
It’s possible to have chronic pain and not be depressed about it. I
t’s possible to have chronic pain and sleep well at night.
It’s possible to have chronic pain and work full-time.
It’s possible to have chronic pain and have a fulfilling and intimate relationship.
Look at all of these ‘possibles’!
If people are open to learning, they can learn to self-manage pain well enough to be able to overcome the problems that accompany ongoing pain. These concepts and practices will take time to learn and apply to your individual lives. It also takes a certain amount of devotion to maintain lifestyle changes, once you learn how to use them. Nonetheless, it is not hard, it just takes practice.
Self- Management
Good self-management of chronic pain involves stress management. When you overcome depression (and you can!), even if chronic pain remains, it’s still a win for you. When you come to sleep well at night, after a period of chronic insomnia, life gets better. Even if you continue to have chronic pain, your life will be better. When the strain in your relationships subside, your marriage and family life deepens, making life more meaningful and fulfilling, despite having chronic pain.
Overcoming the stressors in life, even when they occur as a result of chronic pain, is a way of getting better when there is no cure for the pain itself. Patients with chronic pain might initially wonder why chronic pain rehabilitation providers want to focus on the stressors in their life, but from this perspective, we can see why. It’s a way to get better when there is no cure. If you can’t fix the pain, focus on overcoming the stressful consequences of living with pain. By doing so, you make life easier and better.
You also make chronic pain more tolerable by coping better with it. By overcoming your depression or anxiety, everything in life gets easier to deal with – pain included. It becomes more tolerable. When you sleep reasonably well, on most nights, you deal with everything better – pain included. It becomes more tolerable. The same is true with any of the stressful problems that go along with living with chronic pain. When you overcome them, you cope better with the pain itself. By focusing on reducing stress, you come to cope better and pain can go from what was once unmanageable to what is now manageable, allowing you to go back to living.
Stess and the Nervous System
Stress and its effect on the nervous system can also exacerbate pain through more direct routes. It’s not just the effect that stress has on muscle tension. Stress, particularly the persistent stress of problems that occur as a result of chronic pain, causes changes to the nervous system itself.
These changes occur in the spinal cord and brain and they result in changes in how sensory information is processed. An example of sensory information is pain signals that travel from nerves in the body, through the spinal cord, and up to the brain; the brain then processes this information and the experience of pain results. As a result of persistent stress on this system, the brain comes to process such information with greater and greater sensitivity, and as a result, less and less stimuli is required to experience pain. Thus, it takes less and fewer stimuli to generate a pain response.
It’s generally accepted that by overcoming the persistently stressful problems that occur as a result of living with chronic pain – such as insomnia, depression, and anxiety, you can make some headway in reversing these changes to the nervous system. You might not be able to change them entirely, but enough to reduce the pain itself!
These concepts were game changers for me in my journey with pain. I had no idea how much my stress and lifestyle choices were affecting my pain. Playing with those and learning to care for myself, practicing meditation, and adjusting the way I viewed a lot of things, in addition to being physically active and reconnecting with important things is in my life…Well, that’s when my pain finally began to change.
It can change for you too!
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