Pain Is In Your Brain

Pain is in your brain...Pain is in your brain. Yes, I repeated that to cause you to pause for thought. We so associate pain with the part of our body from which it emerges, that we forget it is our brain’s perception of stimuli coming from that area of the body. We can, with our minds play a real role in pain management.

Before my husband’s knee replacement, his ‘knee bones” were rubbing on each other – bone on bone. There was massive stimuli being sent through his nerves up the spine to his brain alerting him to this. Pain is our alert system that something isn’t working right. When I recently broke my arm, if I moved it in the wrong way there was a major alert to my brain that something was wrong. When we have conditions of chronic pain, such as my husband’s knee before it was replaced or folks with arthritis or fibromyalgia, our brains are perceiving ‘alerts’ continuously. Too bad there can’t be an on/off switch telling the brain “OK, I know there’s a problem there, let’s just turn off the alerts for a while.” Lots of pain medications sort of act in that way.

Often, though, people want to lessen reliance on or don’t want to rely on medication for pain management. Brain training, with NeuroTherapy Training can help you add your mental abilities as part of what you use to tackle pain.

Some aspects of brain training that help in pain management

Regular and effective relaxation of your body.

The build-up of stress and constriction of your muscles accelerates pain. Take a second to pay attention to your body right now. Feel the constriction? If you have a condition of pain, that constriction happening daily isn’t helping. It restricts blood flow and can cause you to hold damaged areas in unnatural positions.

Effective relaxation increases blood flow enabling more effective healing and rebuilding of damage to the body.

 Lessening secondary pain.

Learning to effectively relax the body will help you lessen secondary pain. That is muscles that contract around painful nerves to ‘protect them’. That armor that our nervous system sets up can create pain of its own. It takes effective mental work to coax the body to relax the armor, lessening secondary pain.

Distracting the brain away from its perceptions of pain.

Training your brain involves becoming very good at concentrating. That can benefit your life in many ways but for pain management it’s critical. When I was in the emergency room with my broken arm, I instinctually turned to using my mental training exercises to focus my brain (while simultaneously calming my body). Yes, my brain wanted to switch back to focus on a very intense pain but I ‘stubbornly’ coaxed it away from the pain as much as was possible. You can do a lot with regular use of mental training to coax the brain from a pattern of continuous focus on the pain.

There is so much to be offered by learning and practicing the tools of NeuroTherapy Training, helping you manage pain is just one such benefit.