Is Chronic Pain Impacting Your Life?

I wanted to talk to you about chronic pain because it affects so many people, and it’s something that we can assist with. It’s something that can be helped but what are you doing for it right now, and is it working?

So chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts for over three months. That’s after the general healing time, so if you had surgery, if you’ve had an illness, if you’ve had an injury of any sort, say for example, from playing sport, then that can trigger chronic pain. It’s just simply pain that almost [like] the body has a memory of [it], almost like it’s got a habit of being in pain. And so what we’re trying to work through, is releasing and relieving that cycle [of pain].

How Can it Affect Your Daily Life?

You can imagine that if you’re suffering from this pain every single day it’s going to impact your life, there’s a cycle that happens. So if you have chronic pain you have pain today and yesterday and the day before that, for the last three months at least. It’s affecting your sleep, often waking you up because it’s so bad. And often, even if you get to sleep, you wake up in more pain than you went to bed with.

That is going to impact the nervous system. You know, that fight-flight-freeze response that we have with the sympathetic nervous system? It’s going to impact that. That means if, you are in the fight and flight response, and you can’t rest and digest, and you can’t repair and heal [either].

So we go from pain every day, to a lack of sleep, to that impact on our sympathetic nervous system. That’s going to then affect our mental health, often leading to depression. In fact 45 percent of people who suffer from chronic pain, also have depression. That’s how systemic it can be (your whole being, body and mind, and spirit). Because you’re in pain and you can’t sleep, you can’t repair. When you’re stressed constantly, with your sympathetic nervous system continuously on, and activated, the stress levels can also go up, and that can impact your blood pressure. So now you’ve got a physiological effect from the chronic pain as well.

So all of these things form a cycle, that makes things worse and worse. So we need to break that cycle. I will touch next week on ways that you can help you do that, but you can imagine that if you’re suffering from chronic pain, whether it’s headaches and migraines, sciatic pain, or neck and back pain, these are all common areas of the body that are affected by chronic pain, this can lead to anger frustration because you’re not getting anywhere. In fact, you’re often feeling misunderstood by the medical system. Sometimes you even doubt yourself and feel like a hypochondriac because you feel like there are no answers. There’s often not even any evidence of the pain itself, and so we start to doubt ourselves. Our mind, and our body, and the messages that we get.

What Parts of the Body Can it Affect?

Other areas of the body that can be affected, include:

• sports injuries of:
  • knees
  • ankles
  • hips
  • shoulders
• Repetitive strain injuries of:
  • wrists
  • hands
  • forearms
• Tendonitis or Tendonosis of:
  • ankles
  • feet

These are all areas that can be affected by chronic pain, and chronic pain is something that impacts a lot of people.

Final thoughts:

As I was saying earlier, you can imagine that with a lack of sleep, all these emotional and physical, physiological effects are going to impact your daily life. Do you know that chronic pain sufferers are five times more likely to be limited in their daily activities?

That’s a serious impact on your quality of life!

So my question to you is, how is pain impacting you today?

Tune in next week to find out ways that can help you at home, to start to break through that cycle. 

I want to thank you for tuning in today, and for sharing this space with me. Even, though we’ve not been physically together, face-to-face, I am sending my positive thoughts to you as you watch the replay of this video.

And if you want to jump ahead and see some of the ways that you can start to help yourself, this week, starting today, comment yes below and I’ll send you my ebook on how you can reduce chronic pain, for you. How you can really start to break through that pain cycle.

Till then, I look forward to seeing you either via that ebook, or next week, at our next live. Till then have a fabulous week! Thanks for joining me.

Namaste