Chronic Pain

Yoga and Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is different from acute pain because the pain no longer reflects an actual injury. But because we listen only to the pain signal to distinguish between a healthy body and an injured one, we end up taking a lot of anxious, misguided actions. It’s essentially a map-territory mismatch.

Anxiety triggers a check for pain, so you pay attention to the pain signals. Also, probably because of all the attention you’ve paid to them in the past, you become more sensitive to signals from the muscles and nerves that have caused you trouble, and thus start receiving false alarms. So, your anxiety itself becomes a cause of pain.

Corollary: Reducing stress should reduce pain.

The trouble seems to be that we pay too much attention to the pain signals. We need to shift our attention to something else. Games help us do that by engaging us. Mindfulness meditation helps us do that by occupying our mind with our breath or body.

A nasty side effect is that by paying so much attention to our pain, we start triggering thoughts about the pain any time we see cues about our body, keyboard (for RSI), bedroom, chair, or bike (for back pain). We start associating our body with pain.

We need to teach our mind not to trigger painful thoughts upon thinking of the body or other things. How? Think of all the things that are going well. Learn to think of your body as a friend, something that has your best interests in mind. After all, you are alive and going. Stop just focussing on all the things that are wrong and emphasize what’s good about your body. That way, you will stop triggering painful thoughts all the time.

I suspect gratitude journals work the same too. You stop associating your life with depression and misery and instead remember some good things too.

Notes

Much of this is my notes from Kelly McGonigal’s talk on Yoga for Pain Relief.