Now back
to this pressure applied to my hand. If I increase the pressure, eventually I
invoke a sensation that I would describe as pain, here a threshold of input
from tissues to brain has been reached where the brain now interprets a
problem. The pain experience has begun, a message to my conscious self to say,
please pay attention here, something is not right.
This is an
example of mechanically driven pain. Now in the case of an infection, the pain
is chemically driven, where nerve endings in infected tissues are responding to
chemical changes and pointing out the problem area.
We feel
chemically driven pain during and after a big training session, where so much
lactic acid has been produced in tissues that nerve endings become chemically
irritated and send these messages to the brain.
Some pains
are relatively easy to understand, they are ones we expect, like when I have
rolled my ankle, torn a ligament, the ankle swells, it hurts, I rest it, get
some treatment on the local tissues to help healing, I get moving again and the
pain goes away.
If however
the injury causes me to have a large fear response, say I injure my back at
work, and the injury has an impact on my ability to provide for my family and
say my dad has suffered form low back pain for the last 20 years and I have
watched it cripple his life I am going to be very afraid of what is going on,
and when I am very afraid I am going to get over protective, create adaptive
movements to avoid further hurting anything and I’m likely to become more sedentary.
Further more, my nervous system is going to heed these fear messages and
sensitise itself, so that I will in time feel more and more pain as part of my
brain’s attempt to protect me.
Fear
increases tension as it seeks to protect and in doing so can facilitate and
perpetuate pain. It must always be considered when working with pain.
Education,
creating understanding and empowerment has a huge impact on reducing fear and
pain.
There are
many things that can contribute to the creation of pain. You can get tummy pain
from infected food; you can also get it from stress, and chronic anxiety. You
can get a headache because you’re dehydrated, or because you’ve got a viral
infection but also because you’re
holding onto a build up of frustration or anger.
Chemically
driven pain can be created by poor nutrition. If we don’t eat well, we’ll hurt
more. Other lifestyle factors too contribute. We are more sedentary now than
ever before in history, and when we do exercise, our exercise is often
uni-dimensional, jammed into a short time frame, and often ineffective in
relaxing the tensions and moving the stagnancies in the body that drive
pain.
As kids we
explore and express so much more physical freedom, we run and jump and hop and
wrestle and roll around and dive and climb trees and as we get older, things
become more serious, less fun, less play, more work, more responsibility, more
burdens and so our bodies follow our minds into the contraction.
One of the
biggest generators of pain both chemically and mechanically is stress. Under
stressful situations stress responses involve suppression of the immune system,
increase in heart rate, suppression of digestion, increases in biochemical’s
like adrenalin and cortisol, which are involved in inflammatory pathways and
the creation of tension.
Stressful
emotions like frustration and anxiety are contracting of the body.
Anxiety
for example is a fear, based emotion. It is generated within the body following
a perception within the mind of threat or danger. The emotion drives an action.
All emotions want to become actions. Anxiety wants to move, it wants to run
away or race around and fix stuff or control stuff. If we wake ever day with
challenges that strike worry and fear in us then we are constantly generating
anxious tension.
Likewise
the emotions of frustration and anger generate tension in the body for
fighting. These are emotions of fighting. We have them not just in conflict
with people but also in conflict with situations; at times when we feel
powerless or out of control, which for many is often. Sometimes we might feel
really angry and feel that we cannot express it. The body has been told to
fight and then told to block the action of fighting and so a tension is created
in the body. This is another pathway to pain.
We also
commonly suppress the expression of the emotion of sadness. The emotional body
lives within the physical body. When we suppress emotion we create conflict,
tension and stagnancy in the body – all lead to pain.
So, when
you have pain, pause before you hate it or become afraid of it, and instead,
seek to understand it. Can you see its message and respond accordingly? In your
search to understand the messages you may be confronted by things you’d rather
avoid. Things like the origins of your stress. This is not pains fault, but
rather, your challenge.
Get more
connected to your body so that you can pay more attention to the messages it
conveys, maybe you’ll pick them up before they have to speak so loud as to
become pain. Be mindful of the way you move, how you live, what you eat, and
what stresses you, and importantly learn about how to meet stress, release
stress and reduce stress. This will be the greatest thing you can do to reduce
your pain and help your health.
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