How I cured my RSI?
Entry question: What was really causing my RSI?
Oct 25, 2014
I find a link called “How I Cured my RSI Pain” by some guy. I expect it to be some crackpot stuff. Or maybe a satire or something. Nah. It was serious. Wait, is this guy legit?
I looked him up. Guy’s been to YCombinator and had his startup bought by Google. Whoa. Almost surely NOT a crackpot who believes in woo-woo stuff.
I follow another link and go to a similar post on another blog.
They claim that their RSI was cured with a day or two of reading the Mind-Body Approach book. What. The. F*ck.
Funnily enough, I search for RSI and Mind-Body Approach and get similar posts at exactly the same level of Rave. I’ve never seen people claim such terrific results with a straight face. I’m still suspicious.
But… goddammit… my pain is already gone. I f*ck you not. This is gonna be hard to believe. I’m a goddamn Aspiring Rationalist myself. I am highly skeptical of miracle cures.
It’s like a switch has flipped in my mind. The pain has just instantly gone off. No slow retreat. No dragged out process. Just gone… like that. Finished.
Holy Crap! Could it be true? Was the whole chronic pain thing just in my own head?
Note: All pain is in your head. But usually it correlates with some damage to your body. This pain was not correlating. It was out of sync.
It wasn’t like I bought the whole story and then the pain went away. Even as I was reading the posts, the pain was on its way out. It was like the mere thought of this pain just being a mental creation drove it away.
“Dumbledore’s been driven out of this castle by the mere memory of me!”
– Tom Riddle, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Just questioning its validity seemed to make the pain go away. What is going on here?
Later that day
For the first time in years, I did not approach my keyboard with fear. I had the feeling that it would not be hurtful, and it wasn’t. F*ck.
It didn’t hurt.
How did this happen?
They say that the mere act of approaching something with fear and stress makes you start having pain in that area.
Stress and other factors. Major.
Oct 26, 2014
I typed out about a thousand words on my keyboard. There were times when it seemed like the pain would be back or something… but nah! I typed for 3 f*cking hours and nothing bad happened. Holy crap. At each point, I was half-expecting a bomb to drop and explode my hands away. Nope. It was fine. Mild sensation. But no pain. It was nothing like the last one year. I had never typed pain-free anytime in that whole period.
Oct 27, 2014
Have been writing and typing almost non-stop since 10am. Nothing bad has happened. Yo!
I plan to fork out some money to buy the Mind-Body Approach book. It deserves the Rs 587 just for the past couple of days.
Oct 29, 2014
Pretty much no pain at all while typing. I have this weird foreboding that I’m gonna feel pain, I’m gonna feel pain… but nothing happens.
I’ve been typing away merrily the whole day. Nothing bad has happened. Yay!
Nov 13, 2014
Absolutely no pain at all! Holy motherf*cking crap!
It’s like my hands are soft petals. There’s just no pain at all. Life is awesome!!!
Thank you, Dr. John E. Sarno.
Dec 19, 2014
Some odd kind of pain-like thing in my fingers over the last two days. I think I’ve been stressing myself out by sitting at the computer all day long.
I think I’m beginning to fear the keyboard again. Not cool.
Anyway, let’s see how this goes.
Haven’t been taking ANY micro or rest breaks over the last few days and have been doing intense coding. Plus, putting a lot of weight on my hands cos of poor eyesight (with plus glasses) and because I’m reading and working out a lot of math on the computer.
Crazy Hypothesis: Maybe my mind is doing this to get out of doing all this HARD grinding work on deeply confusing (whoa! My internal alarms just went off!!! Essay-writing, you rock!) hardcore, punishingly complex and strict math and programming.
I mean, there’s so much hard work ahead of me, and I have no clue how useful it will be or how successful I will be at it… and I think my mind is jumping at the chance to get away from all this. Just be a normal guy. Not a superhero. Just a friendly, neighbourhood non-superhero. Do ordinary shit. Work ordinary hours. Live an ordinary life. Get ordinary results. Safe and sound. 7 billion people are doing it, why can’t you?
Jan 12, 2015
Yup. My hypothesis was right, I think.
That happened again. I was gearing up to do some hardcore work in Haskell and all of a sudden, I started getting alarm bells.
“Oh, my hand is hurting again. What am I gonna do? I can’t possibly do all that work now. I guess I will never be able to do that sort of thing… wait a minute!”
I had to make an effort to tell my mind: Yo, I don’t care what you think, I’m going ahead with this. This needs to be done. I’m not going to accept any excuses. I’m not falling for your tricks again. I know that you/I are trying to get out of doing all this work by creating some pain. Not cool.
And that was the end of that.
I think that my crazy hypothesis holds. My mind really is trying to get out of doing some hardcore work in some undefined direction. And it does so by clutching at any and all means to stop me - including creating pain signals in my hand.
No more pain after that incident. Life is awesome!
April 2016
Update: I have none of the pain I used to.
Have been typing away for two years now, with no real problems. I do have some tightness in my wrist muscles at the end of a long day, especially when I write with a pen, something like you have after a long written exam. But nothing that hinders my work.
I’m able to do most tasks that I try: like typing on my tablet or smartphone, bicycling, sweeping the floor with a broom, using the mouse, lifting weights at the gym, etc. I do get some weird muscle pain after sweeping the floor, like my hand is cramping, but it isn’t the kind of vague, nervy, tingling pain that I used to have earlier. It’s more of a physical rather than nerve-related pain (if that makes sense). Also, trimming my nails seems to have an impact on the amount of discomfort I feel at the end of the day. I guess it’s because they interfere with my finger placement during typing (or because my mind is making up excuses).
In short, I was able to get back to a normal life. I don’t fear typing or using the mouse or anything other activity.
I seriously have no good explanation for what it was that the RSI articles did. But whatever it was, it worked.
Some tentative hypothesis tests
Do things that hurt earlier (apparently cos of my RSI)
What activities was I avoiding due to RSI? If they don’t hurt now, it means that my “RSI” really has been cured.
Like bending my hand at the wrist - I got tingling earlier
Doing that weird anti-RSI shoulder stretch at the doorway
Typing on the smartphone or tablet screen
Using the mouse or mousepad
Holding a book by its edge with my fingers - I used to feel pain after a short while
In fact, holding anything with just my fingers hurt.
I was afraid of doing these things. I was stressed about them and according to this new hypothesis, that is why I was feeling pain. Now I shouldn’t feel pain.
Resources
The main resource that convinced me was Aaron Iba’s How I Cured My RSI Pain (Yes, my post title is derivative. The question mark at the end was because I didn’t want to jinx myself.)
Another one: Success Story: How I recovered from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Plantar Fasciitis
And the one that actually cured it for me was Rachel’s RSI homage to Dr. John Sarno.
Now why would your body do this? … Because when you have a full-fledged repetitive strain injury, it permeates every area of your life. Your work, your friends, your peace of mind, everything. You think about it all the time. Want a glass of water? Ooh, that hurts turning the spigot.
Damn this RSI, I wonder if I will have this pain for my whole life! Many people can’t go 10 minutes without thinking about it. And there – THERE – is the driving force behind the RSI. It is so absorbing – SO absorbing, the only parallel I can think of is drug/alcohol/food addiction (i.e. eating disorder) – that you effectively don’t have to think about other things in your life. In some ways you are living like a zombie: going through the motions, but not really living. The RSI is the only real thing in your life, your constant companion, your constant curse.
…
[T]o me the crux of the theory is simply that an RSI is a huge, extremely efficient distraction from everything else in your life. I didn’t realize it at first, myself – sure, it seemed like I was living my life! But as I gradually began to realize what life would be like without the RSI in it, it began to dawn on me what a huge void its absence would leave in my life – how for so long I had relied on it being a part of my life – and what a huge hole existed without it for me to fill. Happily I preferred to start filling it than to leave it filled by the RSI.
I know that sounds like a bit of a wishy-washy explanation, but I feel it’s right.
Even a year back, after I got “cured”, I used to re-focus on my pain when I needed to get started on a major project. I would look at huge amount of work lying ahead of me and begin worrying about how my hands would be destroyed by the end of it. Thus, I would convince myself that I really needed to just take some rest (and conveniently postpone that uncomfortable project).
Mind you, I did none of this consciously. The pain would seem like a legitimate concern. I had to remind myself that RSI pain was probably in my head and kind of push through the “pain”. The minute I resolved that I was indeed going through with the project, the pain vanished.
Again, this has a high risk of sounding woo-woo, especially with “the pain vanished”, but that’s the data I observed. Even if you say I ran some covert self-deception on myself, you still have to explain how I had so much pain I did pretty much no typing for an entire month two years ago, and then suddenly felt no pain at all for years of heavy typing. Even if you say it’s just some placebo painkiller, you still have to accept that it worked. People who are suffering from this pain would any day take a pain-free life over a painful one.
…
Now, not everybody has the same experience that I did. Most of the people who don’t identify with what I’m describing read the book and got better immediately, more or less by themselves! But I have met a number of people who had similar experiences to mine, who often require a little hand-holding in their recovery, and that is why I’m writing this webpage.
In case it’s not obvious, let me mention that I have no personal stake in advancing Sarno’s theory. I’m not getting any kickbacks, unless you count the pleasure of watching people recover from years of debilitating pain in the blink of an eye :).
– Rachel’s RSI homage to Dr. John Sarno (emphasis added by me)
That was me too! This was the article where I found that, halfway through it, my pain was gone. No explanation, no drama, no signals, nothing. It was just gone! I remember sitting in my balcony reading the article on my tablet (because I obviously couldn’t sit at my computer) and just looking at my hand as if for the first time… where is the pain? There was none. For the past several years, my hand had been an instrument of pain, a local sign of the larger collapse of my life, foreboding that something was about to go dreadfully wrong at any moment, like a species on the brink of extinction. And now… it was just a hand.
I have not bought the book by John Sarno. The above articles were enough to do the job for me.
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