Stop Paining That Same Old Tune
Pain can come in many different forms: sharp and stabbing to dull and achy, constant or intermittent, excruciating or mild. Pain is supposed to be informative and protective to make you stop doing things that may hurt you. Informative pain is due to some tissue damage. However, as we will see, long term pain can occur even when there is no longer any tissue damage. The feeling of pain is 100% created in your brain. That does not mean it is not real. But understanding that pain is a brain experience may help those with chronic pain to understand better how to get rid of it.
There are millions of tiny sensors all around your body at the ends of the thousands of nerve cells that you have. Various different senses respond to mechanical forces (stretch or touch), temperature (hot and cold), chemical changes (externally like smells, tastes and poisons or internally like inflammation and hormones). All the information from all of these sensors is sent to your central nervous system so that your brain can figure out what is going on inside and outside your body. The easiest way to think about how this all works is to think of your nerves like musicians with different instruments. Their instruments are the sensors, and all the musicians play their tune so that your brain can listen to what is going on in and around your body. These tunes get put together like an orchestra playing a symphony in your brain. When some of the parts of your brain get messages in a specific pattern, your brain decides to make you feel pain to warn you that something might not be right or that you may be in danger. Several parts of your brain are involved in playing this particular pain music that together are called the pain matrix. But your brain can play many tunes not just a pain tune. The brain can also learn new tunes. Your nerve cells talk to each other through little connections called synapses. These synapses can be talking non-stop or totally silent. How these nerves talk to each other determines what music your brain will hear. Each synapse is surrounded by an immune cell which can influence the synapse itself as well as about 100,000 surrounding synapses working together in a very complex way. All the different systems of your body can be influenced by the music that your brain will play such as the pain tune and thus are interconnected.
Your brain can learn to be in pain, particularly if you pay a lot of attention to the pain tune. Your nervous system has two important subsystems that impact the pain tune in a big way.
One focuses on fight and flight responses (sympathetics) and one is used for digestion, and healing (parasympathetics). When your sympathetic system is active your heart beats faster and your brain mobilizes your body's energy stores and primes your big muscles for a fight or to run away. You become more alert, and you even sweat more. When your brain plays the pain tune your sympathetic system will also activate. This is great if you have an immediate threat that you need to respond to, but this can become a problem over the long term because it will create persistent high levels of adrenaline pumping through your body. Prolonged high adrenaline can change your nerves and contribute to amplifying the pain matrix tune in your brain, making the pain signals seem greater and more constant. If these muscles don’t actually get a workout from fighting or running away, overtime they start to feel achy and sore. This is the reason why exercise is such a great therapy for pain. It helps to release the adrenaline and sends different messages to your brain other than the same old pain tune. If pain limits your activity, you can still help yourself by imagining those movements. Neuroscience research proved that imagining a movement influences the brain in a very similar way to actually doing the movement. This can help to retrain your brain to understand that the movement is not dangerous because imagining doing the movement will not hurt you. It can basically trick your brain into giving you back pain free movement.
Other lifestyle changes that will also help change that pain tune include better sleeps, better nutrition and positive thinking.
James DiGiuseppe is a local chiropractor with a busy family and wellness practice. For more health information or to contact Dr. DiGiuseppe visit: