Lower Back Pain - The 7 Essential Steps To Recovery
What’s the most common form of chronic pain on the planet? Lower back pain! And many people suffer from it for years, with no respite no matter what treatment they try.
It’s those long-term sufferers who have the most to gain from reading this article.
CHRONIC LOWER BACK PAIN REQUIRES A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT APPROACH
Back pain can be considered to be “chronic pain” when it persists over a long time without improvement, despite following treatment recommendations. The fascinating thing about chronic pain is that it has little or nothing to do with actual damage or injury.
Using x-rays of spinal damage, studies show that it’s impossible to predict who will experience pain and who won’t. Incredibly, there is no relationship between the damage and the degree of pain felt.
You may be quite shocked to hear that chronic pain is exactly the same as emotional pain, but in fact fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) shows that this is the case. Acute pain uses different nerve paths, but a map of chronic pain looks just like a map of anger, or a map of sadness.
This might sound even more hopeless but when we see true chronic pain cases with this kind of pattern we rub our hands together with delight because we know we can help! The information in this article could be the best news you’ve had for a long time!
YOUR CHRONIC BACK PAIN - 7 STEPS TO ELIMINATION
Step 1: Take out the stress. Have you ever seen a car alarm that would go off for no good reason? Maybe a slight breeze would blow and off it would go! Your nervous system can be just like that, all tightwired and ready to produce pain at the slightest provocation. By taking out the stress, you help your system to calm down and behave normally.
Step 2: Check your emotional state. Do you react to things angrily? Are you sad? Do you constantly feel frustrated? These things also hype up your nervous system and create or maintain chronic pain. But now we know how to switch these reactions off too, so you can feel calm and think a whole lot more clearly. Try the experiment at the end of this article on something that “gets to you” and you’ll see what I mean.
Step 3: It’s called social engagement. Yes, you definitely need to mix with people in a way that gives you pleasure. There’s a whole field of science devoted to the health advantages (mental and physical) that comes from being involved with people socially, so when you have pain, you especially need to pay attention to this.
Step 4: Being Active. People who don’t get enough physical activity have death rates higher than the combined rates of smoking, drinking, and unsafe sex! That’s how important physical activity is. Physical activity increases your metabolic rate and gives you energy, boosts your immune system and supports good health, and keeps your muscles strong so that they support your bones and joints properly. There’s always a way to increase activity, no matter how disabling your pain is, and no matter your movement constraints.
Step 5: Have an Interest or Hobby. When we’ve got nothing to think about except our pain, our pain gets worse. It’s as if the nervous system picks up on all the attention it’s getting and delivers more! The more you can get your focus absorbed in something else, the more you can help to trick your nervous system into shutting down the pain signalling.
Step 6: Check Co-Dependency. You might be surprised to learn that pain depends on environmental factors, and that if your brain thinks that the pain is useful in your circumstances, it may well try to keep it going! Is your pain serving any useful purpose (no matter how twisted) in your family life? Maybe not, but it’s definitely worth checking out!
Step 7: Actually treat the pain signalling directly. BMSA (Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation) is a relatively new set of techniques that quickly and easily switch off pain signalling. In clinical trials it’s proven to be highly effective for up to 100% of people with chronic pain. You’ll get an opportunity to experiment with BMSA for pain shortly!
TRY THIS BMSA EXPERIMENT
Before you try any treatment, it’s a good idea to “dip your toes in the water” and have some experience of what it’s like. Not everyone responds straight away, but many people do, and so it’s worth while going through the following steps to see what happens for you.
Take a moment to think about your pain, and make up a sentence that exactly describes the pain in your own words. This might be something like:
I have this stabbing pain just above my tailbone I have this burning pain in the middle of my lower back but a bit to the left Etc, etc, etc.
Notice that you’re describing the type of pain, and where it’s located. Now rate that pain out of 10, with 10 out of 10 being the most awful pain you could possibly imagine, and 0 out of 10 being no pain whatsoever.
The next step is to repeat that statement about a dozen times, and each time you say it you follow it with something silly (or at least something that has an emotional impact very different from the thought of the pain). As you talk out loud, you’ll be tapping all over your body (for instance 6 quick taps on your head, 6 quick taps on your chest, 6 quick taps under an arm - wherever you can reach). You might get even better results if you walk around at the same time, especially if you’re following imaginary shapes or letters on the floor.
If we take the example above “I have this deep ache near my left hip”, I’d be tapping along while saying the following sentence, for example:
“I have this deep ache near my left hip, but polka dots taste crunchy.”
You repeat this whole sentence a dozen times while you keep up the tapping process. That’s called a “bracket”. At the end of the bracket, keep focussing on the pain, and as you do that tap repeatedly on your chest while you take a deep breath through your nose and then exhale forcefully from your mouth.
Take a couple of easy breaths and then think about your pain again. Is it still the same rating? Has the pain moved? Do you notice other pain now, instead of the one you started with? What has happened with that pain?
BMSA is much more than this, of course, but this little exercise is a simple way to experience the fact that it can at least impact on your pain. Because everyone is so different, it’s impossible to predict what might happen now, whether you got an obvious effect from this or not. Some people might find their pain continues to decrease. Others will find that it comes back exactly the same or almost exactly the same. If you stick with it (see the book “The Pain Train - Time to Get Off”) you’re highly likely to get the result that you’re after.
Tags: Science
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