Rethinking Chronic Pain: A Journey Towards Healing and Transformation
Pain, particularly chronic pain, is a global issue affecting millions of people. Yet, we often misunderstand and inadequately treat it. This exploration into chronic pain is based on personal insights, learning, and experiences, intended to shed light on how we perceive and manage this challenging condition.
Understanding Chronic Pain
Chronic pain, unlike acute pain which is a normal response to injury, lasts beyond the time of healing and can persist for months or even years. It’s often seen as an indicator of an underlying issue, but sometimes, chronic pain exists without any discernible physical damage. This can be perplexing and lead to misconceptions, further fueling the stigma around chronic pain.
The key to addressing this lies in understanding the fundamental role our brain plays in perceiving pain. The central nervous system interprets sensory inputs based on our past experiences or traumas. If it has learned through past injury that certain sensory inputs equate to damage, it will alert us to the perceived danger through the sensation of pain.
Rethinking the Brain’s Perception of Pain
My journey towards rethinking chronic pain began with a personal narrative. My husband suffered from debilitating chronic back pain for years. Despite living a ‘normal’’ lifestyle and having no discernible tissue damage, the pain persisted. His journey led us to delve deeper into the understanding of the mind-body connection and its role in the perception of chronic pain.
The book ‘Explain Pain’ suggested by his doctor provided valuable insights. It proposed that just as we can retrain our minds to unlearn unhealthy behaviours, we can similarly retrain our minds to unlearn unhelpful responses to sensory input. This approach requires the cultivation of mental health practices like increased distress tolerance, grounding oneself, and self-regulation. (All topics covered throughout various episodes of the ‘Know More Do Better’ podcast on Spotify, Apple and Google, and in the upcoming release in the Healthier series covering Mental and Emotional Health. )
The Power of Mindset and Beliefs
In this context, the teachings of Louise Hay in ‘Heal Your Body’ carry immense relevance. She asserts that our thoughts and beliefs can create or influence physical ailments, suggesting that by changing our thoughts, we can change our experiences. My husband put this theory to test. He worked hard to consciously remind himself that his pain did not equate to physical damage, which helped him rewire his brain and overcome the limiting belief that he was causing damage to his back.
His experience of pain started to recede as he accepted and pushed through the discomfort, modelling to his brain and nervous system that his pain response was hypersensitive and not required in the absence of actual damage.
AI and The Brain: Training and Retraining
The process of retraining our brain mirrors how we train artificial intelligence (AI). AI learns through training data — we feed it examples, telling it what to do under specific conditions. The brain, like AI, can be trained and retrained using our thoughts and beliefs as the ‘training data.’ By consciously telling ourselves when an experience is or is not causing damage, we provide our brain new models to recalibrate its response to sensory inputs.
Navigating Pain with Professional Advice
Of course, it’s important to remember that this journey is best assisted and supported by professional medical advice. Healthcare professionals have the ability to test and discern if the pain we are experiencing is related to physical damage. For cases where physical harm is being caused, the pain needs to be heeded, not pushed through. It’s in instances where chronic pain persists without evidence of damage, that we may find relief in rethinking our approach to chronic pain.
A New Perspective on Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is a multifaceted issue that warrants a multifaceted approach. We need to adopt a broader perspective that includes not only physical but also psychological, social, and emotional aspects. Rethinking chronic pain in this light, and exploring ways to retrain our minds, offers the potential to transform our experience of pain and improve our quality of life.
Always remember, the journey of rethinking chronic pain is personal and unique for everyone. While we can guide, encourage, and support each other, every person must walk their own path to healing.
If you’ve enjoyed this series on Rethinking chronic pain, please join us on the broader Healthier journey, either through the podcast ‘Know More Do Better’ or through the Healthier book series available on Amazon (first 3 titles now available, starting with Personal Growth in “Healthier: Personal Growth’, Intellectual Health in ‘Infinite Intellect: Mastering the Art of Lifelong Learning’ and Generational Health in ‘Beyond Reactions: Nurturing an Emotionally Intelligent, Limitless Generation through Conscious Parenting’.)
