It’s natural to want to distance yourself from chronic pain, whether it’s nature is physical or emotional. Yet, the more we resist, avoid, or brace against chronic pain, the more we fuel the brain circuitry that’s creating the pain.
Without a doubt, it’s counterintuitive to suggest that turning towards pain, accepting pain, or willingly feeling pain would be a helpful, therapeutic strategy. However, this counterintuitive movement of turning towards, meeting with, and even befriending chronic pain is a highly effective strategy.
Why Wanting to Avoid Feeling Chronic Pain Makes it Worse
Chronic pain, which can feel exactly like acute pain, is a very different experience in your brain. Whereas acute pain is a protective warning of tissue injury, chronic pain occurs long after tissues have healed and is more a warning of emotional threat.
It’s as if we have a protective, storage center in the brain for unresolved, likely unconscious, threatening emotions. For example, the fear of an earlier injury or accident can be stored alongside unresolved fears from childhood, like the fear of physical mistreatment and pain, the fear and pain of medical interventions, or the pain of emotional loss are a few examples.
This threatening accumulation of stored fears, while out of conscious awareness, activates unconscious brain and nervous system responses for protection. These emotional threats can trigger the same protective responses that the threat of physical harm can trigger.
These nervous system responses, like elevated blood pressure, muscle tension, and elevated blood sugar are in support of us fleeing or fighting. But in the absence of a physical threat to avoid these same protective reflexes can result in physical pain.
The more we ignore, avoid, or resist the experience of pain, the more threatening the stored pain becomes. It’s this fear of perceived threat by the brain that fuels the neural pathways that are responsible for chronic pain.
How to Effectively Turn Towards and Resolve Chronic Pain
The way to turn off the chronic pain circuitry is to replace the fear of threat with an experience of safety. When we begin to notice bodily sensations curiously, we begin to build new neurological pathways that reflect safety.
For example, when I notice my hand curiously, just noticing sensations like warmth, tingles, or some other sensation, my brain interprets that curious attention as a sign that I’m safe because no one who’s experiencing a life threat is able to notice curiously. People under a serious life threat are running, fighting, freaking out, or fearful but not simply noticing curiously.
So noticing curiously, which is an aspect of mindfulness, creates a sense of safety that can ultimately inhibit the fear based circuitry responsible for most chronic pain. The neurological term for this mindful quality of noticing curiously is ‘interoception’.
If I’m plagued by chronic back pain the example of noticing my hand to generate a sense of neurological safety is a good place to start because my hand represents a more neutral, pain free experience.
However, with the right kind of practice, I can teach my brain that it’s safe, not only to feel my hand, but it’s also safe to feel, to curiously feel sensations related to my back pain. The more my brain learns that these back pain sensations and any related fear can be curiously felt, the circuitry begins to back off and ideally subsides.
Often it takes several weeks for this practice to build enough new circuitry via the process of neuroplasticity for results to become lasting.
A Brief Pause
We can take a brief pause to shift our neurological balance for the better, from threat to safety. This exercise will help to upregulate the healing benefits of the vagus nerve while inhibiting the stress-induced brain circuitry and its damaging biochemistry.
1. Become curiously aware of your hands (or any other body part). Just be aware of any sensations. (This step activates your insula and prefrontal cortex)
2. Breathe slowly and silently through your nose. While this step may feel like you’re not really doing anything, you are so don’t be fooled. (This slow breathing step activates the ventral portion of the vagus nerve that in turn inhibits the stress response.)
3. Take a breath or two while feeling appreciation … for someone you love, or a pet, a beautiful scene in nature, or just appreciating an inner sense of ease or relief. (This appreciation step activates neural centers in your heart, that via the vagus nerve, can signal safety to your brain.)
You can perform the above exercise within 30-60 seconds, or longer if you wish. With repetition, the safety generating neural pathways created by this mindful state will become more established and a part of your embodied experience.
This is a key part of the inner practice that can resolve chronic pain. It’s necessary to change your brain to resolve the neuroplastic pain.
So, practice, practice, practice.
