Could learning how to train your brain, fight your pain?

Ongoing pain – is there anything more difficult to cope with? Finding yourself in chronic pain can be totally debilitating and it can also be hard to know how to deal with. Do you really want to take pain killers on a long-term basis, for example?

Chronic pain is frustrating and upsetting, and according to a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies approximately 100 million Americans suffer with chronic pain on a daily basis. To put it in perspective, this figure is higher than the total of people who have heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. Chronic pain can last for months or even years, and often the cause is unknown. This either means that the source cannot be traced, or that the source is traced but the healing does not appear to happening in the way that you might expect.

Voicing health concerns to your doctor when there is no diagnosable explanation can be difficult, and you may feel that your wellbeing is disregarded as ‘all in your head’.

Taking control of your own wellness could be the first step to overcoming pain on your own terms. The first step is to recognise what causes pain: when you come into contact with something that injures you, your nerves send signals to the brain telling it that there is a problem. This pathway between your mind and your body is something that can then be re-activated even in times when there is not a physical pain present – this is thought to be the cause of some cases of chronic pain.

So, what can you do about it? In theory, you should be able to break the cycle of faulty neural pathways. It will take some practice but the more you work at it, the easier it will become, and eventually the pathway will become disused and your body will adapt to being pain free.

The most important step is to make sure you get enough sleep. Lack of sleep makes it much harder to get to grips with your own pain control, and makes life harder in general. Keeping calm is another important step – anger and anxiety are closely linked, and learning to manage your anger will help keep your anxiety in check. Finally, you need to work on detaching your mind from the pain. You can do this by writing down what you’re thinking or feeling (to have a physical representation of it so that it’s not bottled up), by meditating and by visualisation. When doing a visualisation, imagine yourself totally pain free, and really believe it.