What is Truly Behind Your Pain?

If you have ever experienced a long bout of chronic pain in your life, you may know that many medical professionals will focus specifically on the area with pain. The PTs and Chiros may improve the flexibility, mobility, and strength of the area with pain and then send you on your way. In addition, medical doctors may prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs, nerve blockers, or muscle relaxers.

These methods may make you feel great temporarily (or not at all), but then things come back. Why is that?

In this blog, we will be diving into various reasons as to why your pain becomes chronic (persistent) and why it is crucial to address your pain from a multi-factorial approach. I recently did a coaching call on this topic in the private Facebook group for our members. If you are a member, be sure to listen to it (located in the Guides at the top of the FB group).

How you move, your physiology, your mindset, your hormones and emotions, your diet, and the people around you can all affect your pain. Let’s dive into a few of these today.

Before we hop into each of these sections, you need to understand that all of these concepts work 10x better when used together to reduce pain. Each of these ideas feeds on one another and are all interrelated. Rather than trying to find the “one thing that is causing my pain,” dive into all of these topics at once.

Your Overactive Nervous System
Your nervous system is what allows you to feel pain, and, believe it or not, it can be trained to become overactive! There is a concept called “neural sensitization,” where the nervous system becomes hypersensitive in a specific body area due to repeated prior physical and mental stimuli in that area. For instance, you injured your back. Everything that you did hurt that area, and everything you thought about was related to your back pain. These thoughts and feelings train your nervous system to become hyper-aware of that area. Thus, a minor neural input (slight touch, small cramp, small soreness, etc.) is experienced as a huge pain.

At the beginning of your injury, you probably didn’t expect it to last for months or years. Usually, an acute injury heals within a few days to a few months. If it lasts longer than a few months, it is considered “chronic.” With a majority of chronic injuries, the physical damage has actually healed already. So why are you still experiencing pain? It is likely a combination of a few things that we will talk about in this newsletter, but neural sensitization plays a considerable role. How can you train your body to stop focusing so much on this one area? Put your focus elsewhere!

In the next section, I describe how the body is biomechanically connected. Putting effort into controlling, massaging, and stretching other areas of your body (that are seemingly unrelated to one another) can actually help to desensitize the area that is so prone to experiencing pain.

Now, this may blow your mind in regards to how weird the human body is. “Phantom limb pain” is experienced by amputees who lost their limbs due to a brutal injury. When people have their limbs removed, they still experience pain in the non-existent hand. Why? The studies showed that all of the people with phantom limb pain had also experienced a traumatic injury that mangled the limb. The image of the mangled limb is buried in their mind. Even with the limb gone, they still experience pain there because of their memory of it.

What did the researchers do? They used mirrors. They put people in front of a mirror so that the side of mirror was touching the front of their body/face. The researchers then had them lift the arm or leg with the in-tact limb so that it reflected into the mirror and looked like the opposite limb was being raised. When the participants looked into the mirror and saw the reflection of the good limb on the side of their amputated limb, their phantom limb pain immediately subsided and subsequently disappeared forever. They had tricked their brain into thinking that the once-mangled limb was still intact.

Hopefully, this puts into perspective how confused our brain and nervous system can be regarding pain. When you think about your injury, are you thinking about the horrific MRI or X-ray that you saw or the way that your doctor, PT, or surgeon described your situation to you? Scary words and images can be powerful for amplifying pain.

Your Biomechanics - How You Move!

Your pain in one area of your body can result from limited control or range of motion in another area of your body. For example, if your back hurts, it could be because you cannot control abdominal pressure - but did you know that your shoulder blades play a role in this? Likewise, if your hips hurt, it could result from your lack of shoulder blade control or your limited foot mobility!

Many of you realize that there are ways to exercise and lift objects more efficiently than other ways. For instance, rounding the back to pick up something heavy is much less efficient than keeping your back neutral and rigid, hinging at the hips, and loading the big muscles around your hips (butt and hamstrings). Many of you probably already recognize that hinging at the hips feels much stronger than rounding the back.

Some things are less obvious, however. Every movement that we make causes a chain reaction through our body. For example, while standing, if you lift your arm out to the side, it isn’t just your shoulder that is activating. The muscles around your core will fire (obliques, back muscles, multifidi, Quadratus Lumborum), your various glute muscles will stabilize the pelvis, and your weight will shift to the side that your arm is raised. Even though the weight of your arm is relatively light, your whole body is involved in this movement.

This is why we at Whealth teach a full-body approach to movement. The idea of “it’s all connected” is truly applicable to our movement.

Limited mobility in your hips can result in foot, knee, and back problems. Limited mobility in your upper back can cause lower back, hip, shoulder, elbow, wrist, and neck problems. Limited control of your shoulder blades can prevent proper pressure distribution through the core, causing rib issues, lower back pain, shoulder pain, and hip problems. Weak hamstrings can cause your upper back to round in various movements.

The body is complicated and connected. Our solution? Improve your control, range of motion, and strength throughout your body (even if it doesn’t even seem related to your pain), and you will feel better.

Fascial Lines

To follow up with the biomechanical talk, it is excellent to understand that numerous lines of connective tissue literally connect your head to toe. The deep front line, superficial front line, deep back line, superficial back line, lateral line, and spiral line are all lines of connective tissue known as fascia. These are called fascial lines. Several others weren’t listed and learning the names of them isn’t important.

What is important to know is that the superficial back line, for instance, connects from the base of your skull and spans down the back of your body down to the bottoms of your feet and toes. These pieces of tissue have literally been taken out of cadavers as one solid object. So with that being said, if you are experiencing pain anywhere along this fascial line, the limitation could actually be originating from elsewhere along the fascial line. Lower back pain? Well, it could be coming from fascial restrictions in your feet, calves, hamstrings, glutes, middle back, or neck.

With that being said, this is another reason why we approach movement from a whole-body perspective. Improving movement above or below the area of injury can open up the fascia and relieve tension on the area with pain.

Movement isn’t the only thing you should focus on, though.

The Mind

This is a big one that I am most passionate about. As someone who has experienced dozens of bouts of pain in my short life (likely due to my hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome), it is incredibly important to recognize that these “injuries” are often very minor and are not causing severe damage to the tissue. It is also helpful to focus on the positive aspects of your injury experience.

At Whealth, we focus on gratitude, the negative/positive words that we use, goal-setting, and the power of manifestation. We have watched thousands of people make complete 180's with their pain due to shifting their mindset and how they experience the world around them.

Looking back at the nervous system section of this write-up, you can see how the mind plays a big role in pain. The brain is a giant ball of neurons that interprets your peripheral nervous system’s signals. Once the brain gets these signals, it then determines what to do with them. So the thoughts you have about that pain experience can cause it to get better or worse.

At some point, everyone wakes up with a “crick in the neck” where you cannot turn your head or look around. This usually only lasts a day or two if you know what is happening - a muscle is spasming, or a joint is “locked up.” This is a non-issue. There are instances where people become scared, thinking that they damaged their joints, tore muscles, or crushed nerves in their sleep. This can amplify the pain and even make it last for weeks. If you take a step back and recognize that all you were doing was sleeping, it can help to put things into perspective. How would so many humans be alive if we could severely damage ourselves while sleeping? This example can be applied to thousands of instances where pain suddenly appeared. Unless you were in a traumatic accident like being hit by a car or falling off a cliff, most instances of pain are NOT life-threatening.

As I have mentioned about MRIs, X-rays, and the negative things that docs, PT’s and chiro’s tell us, those negative descriptions and images can severely amplify pain. However, your “case” isn’t that special, your condition isn’t the worst thing in the world, and there IS something that you can do about it.

I won’t dive into this here, but our words are powerful. They can be an extension of what we believe OR create what we believe.

Recap

The entire body is connected. Today, I only focused on how your physiology, neurology, and mind play a role in your pain.

What I didn’t cover today was how your diet, hormones, stress, anxiety, word usage, lifestyle practices, bad habits, and even the environment around you could have an impact on your pain.

When it comes to pain, it can really help to tackle each of these things a little bit at a time, rather than just focusing on one. Improving your movement patterns is amazing for treating pain, but improving your understanding of pain, how you think about it, how you nourish your body, and how you live your life will significantly impact your pain and overall well-being.

If you are looking to dive deeper, we cover each of these topics in our Limitless program and in our private Facebook community.

Until next week,

-Andrew at Whealth