How To Get Long Lasting Relief For Your Back Pain
Have you ever noticed how your back pain doesn’t seem as bad when you are on holidays or siiting out in the sun sipping on a nice glass of wine?
Why does this happen?
The level of pain you experience can, and often is, influenced by such things as where you are, who you are with, your thoughts and beliefs about what is going on, your previous experiences of pain, your emotions, your fears and any other stress that is going on in your life.
Pain is basically a protective response that occurs when your brain perceives that you are under threat. Messages are constantly being sent from the tissues in your body to your brain letting it know if they are been compressed, stretched or irritated in some way.
Your brain evaluates all these messages, decides if they are dangerous or not and can take one of the following actions. With a lot of messages, it will ignore them and not pay any attention to them. For others, it may respond by giving you a slight ache that causes you to change position to relieve the sensation, such as a shift in position when you have to sit down for an hour.
Finally, if it deems it necessary, it can also turn up this sensation to a sharp pain, stopping you in your tracks or causing you to move in a direction to relieve it
The longer someone has being suffering with back pain, the more influence that these messages that are been sent to your brain will have on your pain. The slightest movement or even the thought of a movement can result in pain.
This, for one minute, does not mean that the pain is not real or is just in ‘your head’.
The physical pain response you experience is very real, the aching muscles, the tenderness, discomfort and pain. All very real. But we must recognise that the mind and the body cannot be separated.
What affects the body affects the mind. And what affects the mind, affects the body and there is plenty of evidence to say that lifestyle, psychological and emotional factors are strong predictors of back pain.
So, in order to find an answer to why your long standing back pain has not gone away, we will need to look beyond your muscles and joints and understand the influence that your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, fears etc can have in your back pain.
This is often the key to get long lasting changes and help people feel good again on a regular basis, not just for a few hours.
All of this is taken into account in an initial assessment at out clinic. We want to know about the stresses that your body has been through and what stresses you face on a daily basis.
Combining this with a movement assessment gives us a great deal of information to allow us to come up with a plan to help you get back to living an enjoyable life with minimal back pain.
I will be discussing how we do this in the following two blogs in this series but if you are currently struggling with back pain, and are in need of some help,
Then call us at 09064 66761 and we will be happy to help.
