Understanding Pain

by Nina

The Black Finger Bandage by Berthe Morisot

If you stub your toe, cut your finger while chopping vegetables, burn your hand while taking something out of the oven, or twist your ankle while walking down the street, you experience a physically and emotionally unpleasant sensation. That’s because when something harmful or irritating occurs, your body reacts by creating an urge for you to stop it. And that urge is what we call pain. 

So as uncomfortable as it is, pain is actually beneficial. As part if your body’s protective mechanisms, its function is to: 

1. Motivate you to pull out from a damaging situation and prevent further damage to the tissue.
2. Allow the damaged tissue to rest and begin the healing process.
3. Avoid similar encounters.

But while pain is generally a good thing—people who suffer from congenital insensitivity to the pain response are easily injured and most die at an early age—pain is also a major symptom in several medical conditions and can interfere with your quality of life and general functioning. 

Besides being influenced by the type and intensity of the stimulus that causes your pain, the level of pain you feel is also influenced by how your brain perceives the experience. Several factors can influence your pain perception, including: 

Age. As brain areas degenerate with age so does brain circuitry, so older people have lower pain tolerance and sometimes face problems dealing with pain.

Memory. Our past experience dealing with pain can influence our neural responses to it, causing us to be more sensitive to pain.

This is exactly why yoga pain management techniques can be so effective. Using yoga, you can change your relationship to pain, influencing your pain perception, improving pain tolerance, and changing habitual ways of reacting to pain. 

Acute vs. Chronic Pain

Pain that is the result of injury, surgery, or illness and that lasts for short period of time is acute pain. Acute pain starts when there is a real threat to your body and leads to a reasonable protective response. It then recedes when the stimulus is removed or the damaged tissue has healed. Common examples of acute pain include sprained ankle, headache, paper cut, and stomach ache.

In a perfect body, pain occurs only when needed, and turns off when the initial stimulus is withdrawn and the tissue has healed. However, there are certain medical conditions, such as arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and low back issues, in which pain is a constant feature and persists for at least three months. This is chronic pain. 

Typical causes of chronic pain include:

• Chronic neck and back conditions, such as a herniated disc or vertebra slippage. 
• Chronic conditions that have pain as a symptom, such as many forms of arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and related conditions, and Lyme’s disease.
• Cancer and/or post-cancer treatment pain from chemo and radiation therapy. 
• Terminal illnesses that cause immobility, such as severe emphysema, congestive heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease. 

In addition, there are chronic conditions that cause intermittent pain, such as migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, and multiple sclerosis. Because this pain occurs regularly, it is essentially is a form of chronic pain and you can treat it as such. 

Chronic pain differs from acute pain in three ways: 

1. Your body can become more sensitive to the threat of possible pain symptoms leading to feelings of fear and anxiety.
2. Your brain can become more likely to interpret situations as threatening, and sensations as painful (eliciting a pain response).
3. With the experience of repeated reactions to pain, your ability to differentiate between the many aspects of the pain response (sensations, suffering, and stress) maybe become blurred.

So chronic pain is challenging because it goes beyond the physical presence of pain, and affects your mind-body connection. And the ongoing presence of chronic pain can affect your daily functioning due to changes in: 

• Breathing. Your breath can become more shallow and shaky, making exercise and even normal physical activities more challenging. 
• Muscle Tension. Because your body is in a constant state of “alert,” muscle tension can increase. This will limit your range of motion, which in turn will can worsen stiffness. 
• Movement Patterns. As you try to protect the area of pain, your movement patterns can change dramatically. Some people stop all inessential movement, obviously limiting what they can do in the short term and causing both stiffness and weakness in the long term. Other people grit and bear the pain, only stopping when the pain is so intense that they can’t continue, but they may be creating unhealthy movement patterns that result in uneven physical wear and tear. 
• Body Image. How you view yourself can change from physically capable to weak and incapable, which makes you less willing to take on physical challenges or even to keep yourself exercising regularly. 
• Thought Patterns. Chronic pain can cause you to become less optimistic about your pain and your life in general.
• Emotions. Your emotions may become generally more volatile, leading you to become angry, frustrated, tearful, and/or overwhelmed. 

Although chronic pain can cause all these serious issues, they are all problems that you can address with yoga. And as you consciously address your chronic pain, you can reverse the physical, mental, and emotional damage that it has caused. 

Whew! Now that you’ve learned about the difference between acute and chronic pain, and about the side effects caused by periods of chronic pain, you’ll be better able to use the tools we describe in our posts Techniques for Managing Pain with Yoga and Changing Your Relationship with Pain.

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