Did you know that most of the time, tissues in the body heal within 3-6 months? Beyond those six months, an overprotective brain and sensitive nervous system, as well as other experiences, are fueling the cycle of ongoing pain.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you injure your ankle. It makes sense to immobilize it at first. It is sensitive, maybe swollen, we don’t want to injure it further or cause more damage. The natural impulse to avoid any movement and the resulting pain is important. It’s communication that comes from our body’s threat detection system in order to protect us from further damage.

What can happen is that the person, their body, get’s locked into a pattern of avoiding movement, use of that area of the body, or activities that trigger pain or soreness. Maybe this avoidance or lack of movement is a little at first, but it snowballs over time. During this stage of acute pain, fear plays a major role in recovery and potential to turn into chronic pain.

The main reason why this happens for so many people: Most people understand what their injury is, but they otherwise aren’t sure what is going on, the role of fear, how pain works/is processed, and what they should and shouldn’t be doing in their recovery. People are scared of causing more damage or reinjuring themselves. As a result, they just avoid any movement that hurts.

Here’s another scenario. You have nerve damage from an injury. You have a hard time adjusting to the pain. Your symptoms start to control you, your physical conditioning suffers, and so does your quality of life. Then, over the years, you experience constant headache, chronic fatigue, back and hip pain, numbness and tingling in your hands and feet, “electrical” sensations in your legs, muscle soreness, sensations of random pain and burning throughout your entire body, becoming more widespread. Your diagnosis? Fibromyalgia, neuropathy, chronic fatigue, depression.

Sometimes injuries don’t fully resolve and becomes chronic pain that is persistent. This is a scenario that happens all too often as a result of a pattern of fear, avoiding movement, and lack of education.

In my opinion, there are conventional approaches to acute pain and injury that complicate this potential cycle of fear, avoidance, and chronic pain:

1. Go home and rest: Of course rest is an important component for healing. Many people however, are avoiding moving the injured area all together for too long. They are getting too much rest. Your providers should have a conversation with you about what the balance is for giving the injured area the rest it needs while still giving it the movement needed for optimal recovery, healing, and letting your brain know you’re safe. This should be ideally tailored to your unique situation.

2. Avoid certain ways of moving: Many patients are encouraged to avoid certain weight limits, certain ways of moving, certain tasks or types of exercise in order to avoid reinjury. This instill so much fear in our brains and bodies about this area of our body. At some point, this advice actually makes reinjury more likely because we aren’t regaining strength in that area of the body and giving our brain evidence that it is safe to move it.

3. Instilling the belief that the body, or a certain area of the body is fragile and weak: When we are told that we have a bulging disc, a pinched nerve, bone on bone, a stress fracture, it instills a lot of fear in us about our bodies in that moment. No one tells us “not to fear”, and it can make us think that we are fragile or that we are always on the verge of injury at. Your provider should tell you what your injury means, what your findings mean, how common those findings are and whether they can explain your current symptoms, and what your injury DOESN’T mean in terms of movement and your future.

4. You need a medical fix: I don’t think anyone would argue that medicine and conventional medical approaches to pain are so important when we are talking about acute pain. Unfortunately, after years of having pain, I still hear so many people talking about how they bounced between many health care providers: rheumatologists, neurologists, primary care physicians, pain specialists, physical therapists, and psychologists. They’ve undergone ultrasounds, x-rays, MRI’s, CT scans, and other diagnostic tests. There’s so much time and money spent on finding a fix to a physical problem when pain, as we know, is more than just physical. Why not educate on how the brain produces pain and how we can be in control of how much threat our brain perceives?

The brain can produce pain EVEN in the absence of an injury or after an injury has healed. AND this ongoing pain can be unlearned.

While there’s much to be gained from growing during a difficult journey, we can also set the new course for the pain journeys of women by simply providing accurate education as early as possible.

Education provides the power to take the next step in managing your pain. You want to do the things you enjoy (or even basic daily activities) without flaring up your pain. For a limited time, you can grab my free video tutorial to get you started:

3 Simple Steps to a Balanced Day... Without the Flare-Ups.

This free video tutorial is dedicated to helping women with pain begin to find confidence to return to the moments, activities, and people they love the most.

If this journal has been helpful for you, I want to hear about it! Drop me a line at anna@drannaredmond.com.

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