Change Your Brain To Stop the Pain Train!

"In The Arms of Morpheus," Sir William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens

Did you know that your brain has 100 billion nerve cells and 1000 trillion synapse? Every synapse is used to pass information around your brain and body.

Your brain changes constantly, instantly, and efficiently in response to messages from your body.  The messengers are our senses, thoughts, beliefs, memories, emotions, and movement.  Diseases, traumatic events, and stress also influence the brain.  The process by which these changes take place is called neuroplasticity. 

Every time we learn a new skill, visualize, or recall a stressful or traumatic event, we are literally changing our brains based on the new pathways that are created via the electrical and chemical signals in our cells.  Repetition reinforces the strength of the pathways, causing a genuine anatomical change.

With chronic pain, our brains change due to the constant pain signaling loop between the brain and the body.  We may suffer significant losses: loss of function, loss of quality of life, loss of purpose, and loss of any sense of control over our bodies and lives.  This may leave us feeling isolated, worries, helpless, and out of touch.

The challenge is to reverse the brain in pain.  To accomplish this, we can use thoughts, images, sensations, memories, soothing emotions, movement, and beliefs to harness the power of our brains to modify the pain.

Some tips to slow down the runaway brain in pain:

• Visualize a soothing place.  The more detail the better.
• Think about what you do to soothe someone else, then soothe someone else.
• Think about who soothed you when you were a child and how they did this.
• Pay attention to which emotions accompany your pain and then change them to something more calming.
• Focus on the pain and breathe it out of your body with each breath.
• If your pain increases, visualize getting into the upper part of your brain and push the pain back down or completely out of your body.
• Use the experience of fear that accompanies your pain as a signal to self-soothe.
• Remember the worst pain will always let up.
• Do not let your pain make you give up.
• Be relentless in your effort to reduce your pain.
• Accept the help that's offered to you with grace and gratitude.
• Give up on giving up.
• If you're drowning, throw yourself a life preserver.

If you're not getting the results you want to manage your pain, please consider traditional Chinese medicine as an alternative to hopelessness.

An excellent resource on neuroplasticity is neuroplastix.com