Welcome to the Education Hub
Science-based tools, insights, and resources to help you understand your pain and retrain your body’s protective systems with confidence.
This is your space to learn, explore, and build confidence in understanding chronic pain.
Here you’ll find science-backed insights, podcast interviews, and expert guides designed to help you retrain your brain, calm your body, and live more fully, one informed step at a time.
Listen and Learn
Chronic Pain: It's Not In Your Head
Have you ever been told that your pain is all in your head? It's more complicated than that when we consider how it affects our complete body and mind. We talked all about this on the On Call Empath Podcast.
Chat with a Pain Psychologist
I sat down with physical therapist, Dr. Alissa Wolfe, for a chat about why chronic pain education is so important but so hard to find in the health care system.
Pain and the Body's Threat Detection System
Dr. Redmond brings much needed clarity on the brain science behind pain, the factors that contribute to whether or not pain becomes chronic, and how the nervous system is intimately involved.
How To Stop Chronic Pain
Kim Gross and guest Dr. Anna Redmond discuss chronic pain management, specifically catering to high-achieving women. Dr. Redmond emphasizes the connection between chronic pain and perfectionistic behaviors, explaining how focusing on values rather than pain can significantly improve one's quality of life.
Where Does Pain Come From
Dr. Derrick Hines sits with Chronic Pain Educator, Dr. Anna Redmond to discuss the underlying reason for pain. Tune in to learn what types of pain exist, how your mind affects the way you feel pain, how to stop pain before it becomes chronic, and more!
How to Deal With Chronic Pain
In this episode of A Healthy Push podcast, Shannon Jackson chats with Dr. Anna Redmond, a chronic pain educator and trained pain psychologist. We sat down for a conversation on the relationship between chronic pain and anxiety.
Explore the Blog
Science-backed lessons, practical strategies, and real-world stories to help you understand and retrain pain.
Chronic pain is like… a car alarm.
I know I’ve said that your body is not a car. And it’s not. Your pain is more complex than replacing or fixing your parts. Uour pain is unique and multifaceted, the combination of factors that impact you, treatments, therapies, or tools is also going to be multifaceted and unique to you.
But today I’m talking about something a little different. I love thinking of the pain alarm system as similar to a car alarm.
It really is such a perfect analogy. Evolution naturally built and provided this alarm system to keep you out of danger. Your brain is at the center of this alarm system and goes off when it thinks (THINKS) something is wrong or that you are potentially in danger. In a system that is working well, you get a warning that something is wrong.
Alarms can be faulty though, am I right? They can misfire. Our internal mechanisms are the same.
What factors influence our alarm system’s perception of danger?
Stress.
Anxiety.
Fear.
Depression.
Poor sleep.
Overactivity.
Underactivity.
Poor nutrition.
Those are some examples. And right after they increase our alarm system’s perception of danger, they move straight toward increasing sensitivity in your body and resulting in a greater protective experience of pain.
Consider this analogy:
Your chronic pain is like a car alarm.
The intention of a car alarm is to go off to alert you that someone is trying to enter and, perhaps, eventually steal your car. We all know, however, that sometimes car alarms can be really sensitive - going off when a large truck passes by or when its gently bumped. And then other car alarms hardly go off at all. Either way, if the alarm goes off accidentally without any sign of danger, we’d consider it a false alarm. When a car has a sensitive alarm system, it sends out more false alarms.
Similar to a car, we know that there are some people with more sensitive alarm systems. The alarm systems in those people produce more false alarms (C.T. Chambers, personal communication, 2013).
When you learn about and understand the number of factors that can change the sensitivity of your body’s alarm system, then you can better understand how to calibrate that alarm system, setting it up for healing. Just because your alarm system may be sensitive, doesn’t mean that you can’t recalibrate it.
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.