What a pain.
Pain is a real pain in the a$#
Pain is complicated.
It’d be nice if it was as easy as
1. It hurts 🤕
2. Find out why 👨🏻🔬
3. Fix it. 🔧
But, unfortunately, it’s not.
Pain is a complex, multi-faceted thing.
Sometimes pain comes from an acute injury like a fall or a scrape.
But most of the time pain just...shows up.
Something just starts to hurt, and we don’t know exactly why.
The science of pain is still emerging and developing, with huge strides in the past 20 years changing the way we've viewed pain for centuries.
Pain isn’t just damage to our tissues (muscles, tendons, bones, etc).
We can have pain because of stress or anxiety.
We can have pain because of something that happened to us in childhood.
We might feel pain because of fear - fear related to certain activities or parts of our bodies, or fear for the safety of our body.
Pain is as much about the future as the past: it’s our body and mind subconsciously fearing what *might* happen - setting off an alarm based on what our brain predicts may happen to that part of the body if we continue on doing what we’re doing.
Pain (especially chronic pain) is a form of threat prediction.
Sometimes pain is a friendly hand, reminding us to stay away from the edge of a cliff to keep us safe, and sometimes pain is an overzealous helicopter parent who won't even let us climb the mountain for fear that we might get too close to the edge.
Things would be so much more simple if it was as easy as identifying pain and solving it - with exercises, pain-killers, or surgery. But it’s not that easy, and often those things are short term solutions for a really complicated problem.
And, unfortunately, I don’t have an easy answer for you on this one.
It’s pretty much inevitable that we’ll experience pain in our lives, and more or less a crapshoot that any particular modality (exercise, physical therapy, soft tissue work, surgery, etc) could make that pain go away.
This isn’t one we can easily solve, but we can reframe it:
🔹Realize how complex pain is
🔹Honor it (in ourselves and in each other)
🔹Take a wider view on it: not just looking at the point of pain, but the person who is experiencing it.
🔹Realizing that pain doesn’t make us “broken” and that we are still capable.
Hope this article hasn't been too much of a PAIN for you to read! 😎