Easing pain using your brain is easier than you think. Here’s how…
Nerves are really efficient at delivering pain messages to the brain and telling us what we need to pay attention to. But can we turn off the nerves once we’ve listened to the message? No, not entirely, but we can turn down the volume. Below are some tips on psychological methods of pain management. They’ve been tried and tested in many clinical studies.
Pain feels different according to its emotional significance. If pain seems chaotic and endless, it’s more difficult to deal with. Learning to relax is key to dealing with pain, and this is a skill that you can improve with daily practice. Use a mindfulness audio like this one to take you through the process. As you make it part of your daily routine, it changes your brain, lowering stress hormones throughout the body and improving sleep (stress and poor sleep make pain feel worse). Using your relaxation training, you can experiment with some or all of the techniques below for pain relief.
Relax And Imagine…
- In a relaxed state, notice your pain has a colour, temperature, size and shape. Using your imagination, notice the colour gradually changing to a pink that blends into the interior of your body; then notice the temperature changing little by little to a healthy, natural warmth; then notice the shape smoothing and shrinking until it fits seamlessly into your body, like a puzzle piece. Let it sink below your awareness.
- Relax even more deeply and take some time to notice the parts of your body which are completely pain-free. Let those take up your attention for a while. The whole is bigger than the part.
- Relax, drift away and imagine viewing your body from the other side of the galaxy and watching from far away as the colours, textures and shape of that pain change themselves into comfortable, manageable forms.
- Have your hands or feet ever gone numb with cold? After you’ve relaxed deeply, imagine the look, smell and feel of a snowy day. Really build the picture in your mind. Make a snowball and notice how your fingers go numb. The colour of icy blue can gently transfer itself through your arm until it reaches and seeps into the area of your pain, bringing a cool numbness to relieve it. (This technique is very successful for dental anaesthesia too, by the way!).
- Move beyond the idea that the pain is unchanging and will last forever. You can use a non-emotional part of the brain by grading its intensity. If yesterday it was a 9 (on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst) it might be an 8 in the morning but sink to a 5 later. Take some time to relax physically and ask yourself, What will it feel like when it’s only a 3?
But, of course, these techniques won’t get to the root cause of your pain. Book in for an appointment with our chiropractors or physio here in Brighton to get the effective treatment you need.
Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27575449/
https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/9900/Disentangling_self_from_pain__mindfulness.127.aspx