Pain, Your Mind and How it Works

By Chessie Roberts

Many of you have aches and pains and a lot of people live with chronic, sometimes crippling pain. What is pain? The dictionary defines it as physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury. As you grow from a child to an adult you learned that if you arm hurts, you treated your arm, you stomach or whatever body part that you felt was the problem. Please understand that yes, pain is real and there to let you know that something is wrong but that is not the pain I am referring to. This article is discussing chronic pains like the ones you have with any chronic issue, like arthritis, crohn’s, fibromyalgia …that sort.

The truth is that, even though you are injured or ill, your pain signal is just that, a signal. It is sent to your mind and that is what gets your attention. This is not a new idea. It has been used for centuries and it works quite nicely. If you have tried pills and potions and found them unsatisfactory, finding what you need right inside your brain just may be quite helpful for you.

You have several levels of pain response; mental, emotional and physical. OK, you have an injury. It sends signals up your sensory path that will give you a physical sensation. You may tense up against that and “push against’ the pain. The second path takes the information to the areas of your brain that process emotion. (amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex) So you feel upset and may cry, shake or have other emotional reactions. So there you have it, you are having two reactions to your injury, one emotional and one physical. If you can calm both of these reactions your pain will diminish.

The first technique to learn is to relax into the pain. As you consciously relax the area that is troubling you, the pain decreases. Take having an injection for example. If you tense the muscle the needle is to pierce, the added resistance will create a denser wall to penetrate. If, however, you relax the area, there is less resistance. Same with any other pain. When you tense the affected area you create resistance and, like the Law of Attraction says, “what you resist persists” the same is true for pain.

OM Times Magazine » syndicated