Pain, stress, and tension are closely related. Muscles tighten and put pressure on nerves resulting in even more pain.
It’s possible to activate your body’s natural relaxation response to help reduce the tension using mind-body tools like:
Helpful videos
Free Apps Complaining about pain only puts the focus on the pain and as a result can worsen the pain.
To champion pain, it's important to change our thoughts about pain, accept it, and learn how to manage it. That's the focus of the 1,700 member Chronic Pain Champions - No Whining Allowed Facebook support group. All it takes to join are answers to a few easy membership questions. Come join us! Chronic pain can make it easy to feel overwhelmed, reduce our activity levels, and become isolated. Goals help restore a sense of order, build self-efficacy and sense of control, improve mood, and provide direction by helping with planning daily activities.
One of the tools we learned at the Mayo Clinic Pain Rehabilitation Center was goal setting to help us plan our days and keep us on track. We set goals each day. They didn't have to be massive, but they had to be SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Some SMART goal examples:
Did you notice none of the goal examples included pain reduction? Our focus should be on reducing stress, improving our quality of life and increasing functional ability and activity, not pain reduction. Focusing on pain reduction is an easy trap to fall into - leading to frustration and depression. Just as the headline of my website says - we can live well, despite the pain. Pain is not just in your back, your knee, or in any body part.
Pain is comprised of biological, psychological and social factors. It is biopyschosocial. And it involves the brain 100% of the time. The biopsychosocial model of pain stresses a holistic look at the experience of chronic pain. It not only looks at the biological factors (injury, tissue damage, etc.) but also how our emotional well-being and our social situation influence how we’re affected by chronic pain. Learn more
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WelcomeChronic Pain Champions is an information resource/blog/support group to help people living with nonmalignant pain, their families and friends, as well as healthcare professionals. Learn more about this site and the author. Archives
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Tom Bowen Chronic Pain Champions |