Simple Way to Look at Chronic Pain

Everyone has experienced pain throughout their lifetime, it is an experience produced by the brain to protect you! But when it is persistent or chronic it is not fun, however it is more than likely not tissue damage being the major factor to your pain experience. So what is driving my pain?  

Think of yourself as a cup

If you think of yourself as a cup, and in the cup you have all the stressors in your life that may be contributing to your chronic pain. Stressors can be anything from work stress, past history with pain, anxiety, physical stress, fear of movement, false beliefs and even lack of support. When we see a lot of these stressors in our lives, the cup gets too full, it overflows and we might get pain. 

How Do We Stop the Cup From Overflowing? 
We have two options to stop the cup from overflowing, we could decrease what's in the cup or we could increase the size of the cup.

Decrease What is in the Cup
To decrease what is in the cup we have to identify what stressors are in the cup first and then decrease the impact these stressors are having. Some strategies to do this are:

• Decreasing anxiety or depression
  
• decrease our work-related stress
  
• decrease our fear of movement
  
• modify the loads on our body. 
  

Increase the Size of the Cup
To increase the size of our cup we again have to identify what is in the cup and then develop our ability to combat these stressors. Strategies include:

• gradually improve our tissue health/strength through exercise
  
• improve our confidence with movement
  
• develop strategies to deal with anxiety and depression
  
• build positive beliefs. 
  

So ask yourself what's in your cup? What can I decrease? or how can I build a bigger cup?

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​To help understand pain visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_3phB93rvI 

Izaac Boylan
Accredited Exercise Physiologist