Had chronic pain for years? This is for you
If you’ve been in pain for years, then you know the toll it can take on your health and wellbeing. Chronic pain impacts on your mood, vitality, and sense of wellness and can make just getting through each day challenging. Whether it’s chronic low back pain, fibromyalgia, arthritis, migraines or headaches, chronic pain can sap your enjoyment of living. The good news? There’s some really simple strategies that can help.
What is Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is any pain that lasts longer than three months. It can feel like burning, stabbing, a dull ache, heaviness, a nauseating pain. Acute pain is often from an identifiable cause-injury, sickness, trauma and after a period of intensity gradually declines and disappears. Chronic pain can be complex because pain can persist long after an acute injury or stress has passed. There’s often no identifiable cause as to why the pain is still happening.
Why does Chronic Pain happen?
Chronic pain occurs because of changes to how your nervous system and brain process pain. When there is damage to tissue, pain receptors send signals to the brain that are interpreted as pain. But only when the brain sends back a message to those pain receptors with the pain actually be felt. What can happen in chronic pain is that these receptors continue to send signals long after the damage has passed, and your brain continues to process them as pain. Why? Well usually because there is something disrupting the brain’s ability to process these signals-either nerve damage and inflammation, or stress.
From a Chinese Medicine point of view pain is often seen as Stagnation-of blood, fluid, or qi. That because of injury or trauma, even exposure to things like cold or wind, the natural flow of the body is disrupted.
In the same way, the nervous system is stuck in a stressed state and cannot process the pain signals and feedback from pain receptors.
So, How do you relieve Chronic Pain?
Chinese Medicine has been addressing all kinds of diseased states and disorders over the past two thousand years, including chronic pain. But there’s one thing that both mindfulness and acupuncture are focused on, regardless of what disease or condition the body is experiencing. It’s returning the body to a state of balance and harmony. The way to do this? Regulate the nervous system.
One of the remarkable features of the brain is neuroplasticity-the capacity to reform and reorganise neural pathways that differ from its previous state. In the lens of chronic pain, it means your brain has the innate capacity to function differently from a stressed and painful pattern.
A calm and regulated nervous system is the first step in allowing such changes to occur. Meditation and mindfulness impact positively on the brain and encourage neuroplasticity and allow the nervous system to function in a restful state.
In my experience what I so often witness, both with clients and with my own recovery from chronic pain is the tension and agitation that arises in response to uncomfortable feelings such as pain, and a reflex to distract, avoid, and get away from those feelings. With intense and severe pain this is totally understandable, and at times necessary. However, with mindfulness and kind and non-judgemental awareness, learning to feel these feeling of pain and discomfort actually serves to decrease the stress response and alert the nervous system to the fact that it is safe and no longer in a threatened state. With time and the right support this can go a long way to relieving the underlying stress that is contributing to chronic pain.
By no means is this a complete answer to a chronic pain picture, it’s simply a place to begin finding some relief. Every chronic pain pattern is unique to the individual experience it. There are however, some factors that contribute to the picture such as inflammation, poor gut health, anxiety or depression, a history of trauma, diet, exercise and lifestyle.
Having found Mindfulness and TCM both instrumental in recovering from chronic pain myself, I’m passionate about helping other people find comfort and ease in their body and mind.
Peter Haxell is a registered Acupuncturist and TCM herbalist has been in practice since 2015 and is passionate about helping clients who are stressed, unwell and in pain feel good in their body.
