In less than a month I will be speaking at Mindset Unlimited – The Wokingham Wellbeing Festival. I will be talking about the science of pain in my talk
What your pain is trying to tell you and why reaching for the tablets may not be the answer?
The science of pain and how understanding the mind-body connection can change your relationship to your pain and how you manage it when it flares up.
Persistent pain affects around 15.5 million or 34% of the adult population of England (versus arthritis, 2017). This is pain that persists for more than 3 months and impacts on people’s functioning on a daily basis and might include migraines, headaches, back pain, shoulder/neck pain or joint pain. People often seek help through medication, Physiotherapy, Osteopath, Chiropractor and acupuncture, mostly with the aim of getting rid of their pain.
Pain though is an almost universal experience and understanding our pain system can take away some of the fear and stop us doing some of the things that work in the short term but can make things worse in the long term. Pain is real, it is complex and it is an interaction between the mind, the body and the environment.
When you understand how the mind and body are connected and the fundamental role that the mind plays in our experience of pain, you can start to understand why you have pain and then work out what it is that you need. The difficulty is that pain can switch off our frontal lobe (thinking part of the brain) and turn on our fight/flight mode (threat) so sometimes we need to first learn how to calm the mind down through the ABC for pain. Activity (or movement), Breathing, Cold water.
Once we reconnect the mind and the body then often we can work out what it is that the pain is trying to tell us and what it is that we need in order to help ourselves in the longer term. This session includes explanations of the science of pain as well as personal stories to help put the information into context. It would include some practical strategies and demonstrations on how to begin to manage pain by calming down the threat system and switching on the thinking part of the brain through the ABC for pain.
Although aimed at persistent or chronic pain, this session is likely to be of interest to most people as we all are likely to experience pain at some point of our lives.
Find out more at www.mindsetunlimted.co.uk