The Pain Experience
The pain experience is unique to each of us, yet many of us suffer from chronic or persistent pain. According to the American Academy of Pain Medicine 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain and nearly 1 in 5 Americans say pain interferes with daily life.
Pain gets our attention. We may experience pain as weakness unpleasantness, tightness, numbness or tingling. We might take a protective posture, experience fear, anger, grief. There might be a change in our breathing, grit our teeth, tense our tissues. We may decrease movement and stop doing the things we love.
The Pain Experience
Think about a time in the past where you ate something very cold and experienced brain freeze. The experience of brain freeze teaches us a lot about pain. When we experience brain freeze we have NOT damaged our tissues, but experienced great pain that made us stop or change our behavior. The amount of damage and the pain don’t match up, telling us pain is complex. And this means the solution might be complex as well.
Unfortunately, there is only one person that can feel our pain, and therefore only one person responsible for our pain. In order to begin to understand pain we need to look at it from different points of view and different perspectives. There is not one simple aspect or way to come at pain, or one solution around pain.
Pain Education
Pain science education is an effective and evidence-based intervention for people in pain. When we understand pain better, we take a different path towards recovery. We gain hope that there’s other options out there to change our pain. A yoga therapist can teach you to move with more ease and increase your activity, as well as to decrease your pain and live well again.
Think about the experience of brain freeze again. Danger signals go through your spinal cord to your brain to get you to stop eating the cold food. If you tried to keep eating the cold food despite the pain, your body would then give you muscles weakness or a freeze response to get you to stop eating. You might even curl into a ball into a protective posture and hold your head. You might curse (anger) and hold your breath. You might notice tension in your whole body as it resorts to protecting you from brain freeze. That is your body resorting in one situation to all the ways of protecting you!
Definition of Pain
The International Association of the Study of Pain defines pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.
Pain is unpleasant because it needs to get our attention. It is sensory and emotional because you can’t have pain without an emotion attached to it. All of your experiences of your past will change your experiences right now. And all your predictions of experiences in the future will affect your pain right now. Which again reminds us pain is complex.
Potential tissue damage gets our attention as well. For a moment pull back on your index finger until you just start to feel a sensation of pain. Let go of your finger and the pain will stop. That means we had pain without damage to the physical body. The system was telling us if you keep pulling your finger back, you will cause damage, so stop. The first pain you feel when you move will never result in tissue damage. If you are moving gently, you will never injure yourself at the onset of pain.
Pain is an experience and experiences are powerful. Our experiences are unique and individual. Therefore our pain is unique and individual.
Our pain is an alarm system. It can warn us when we are approaching damage or have damaged our bodies, but it doesn’t always. It can also warn us when we are in a situation in which we have experienced pain in the past. This can create a cyclical fear factor in pain.
Treatments for Pain
Spend some time thinking about this and see if these ideas fit with your unique pain experience. Ask a yoga therapist for guidance through these topics. There is not a one size fits all approach to pain and individualized yoga therapy can work with your current treatment options to reduce your pain. Schedule your free consult here. Check out testimonials from others who have decreased their pain. You can live pain free with virtual yoga therapy from anywhere in the world. Let me be your guide in the process. It will change your life. Learn more here.
