I’d like to share something that I learned, which
helps me a lot in dealing with my physical pain ❤️
Acute pain is a danger signal from the body.
If you hurt yourself, the body lets you know that something is wrong, it’s saying ‚Hey, I need some time to rest and heal‘.
Once the acute danger is over and you let your body rest, the brain starts down-regulating the pain signals. The pain stops (or gets way less), even before the injury is completely healed. BUT: This is not the case when you are in a state of chronic pain. When pain goes on for a prolonged time and there is a lot of worry and stressful thinking going on about it, the brain gets very ‚good‘ at experiencing pain.
This means, a lot of neural pathways get build up in the brain that are specialized in processing pain
(’Neurons that fire together, wire together’).
That can lead to an 'over-sensitization' to pain in the brain.
At that point even very ’normal’ neural signals from the body can get amplified by the brain and you might experience them as severe pain. (In my case, I can lie in my bed, very comfy and warm, and still my muscles can feel as if I was running a marathon.)
In my experience it can be very hard to not ‚believe‘ these sensations. I used to get into a lot of obsessive thinking about the pain, and about my body, because it feels like there is something seriously wrong.
But there isn’t anything wrong in the body - it’s just a dysregulated nervous-system, that got over-sensitized by a lot of stressful thinking about the pain. There might have been a physical cause for the pain in the beginning (like an injury), but at this point nothing you do on a physical level will be of much help.
What actually helped me is to stop and just realize this.
To really, deeply realize:
No matter how severe and intense this feels - there is NOTHING wrong.
There is NO danger.
Even while writing this I feel myself relax 😊
The picture I added to this post is to help make this more clear - to show that in chronic pain, there is a bigger part of the brain involved in processing it.
And what was important to learn for me also:
The pain might take some time to calm down.
Even if you stop obsessing right now in this moment, if you realize all the thoughts about the pain are not true, and you just let them pass - it might take a while for the pain to calm
down.
It doesn’t matter.
The really good news is:
Neural pathways that aren’t used get automatically
clipped away. You don’t have to do anything about them - they diminish on their own.
I would love to know what you think about this ❤️
(I learned a lot of this from Dr. Sarnos teaching and a few other resources around the TMS healing approach.
Important note: This is not medical advice. I’m talking about TMS - Tension Mindbody Syndrome - here, not about structural diseases.)
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