Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Pain

All of us have suffered an injury, whether minor or severe, during the course of our lives. We all have experienced varying degrees of pain. Some of us, unfortunately, may even have constant and chronic pain.

Pain is scary to experience. It might be ever scarier if we do not know why we are feeling it.

I’ve worked with so many clients who have told me that they are terrified to return to their favorite activities. Hikers afraid to venture into the mountains in the fear that their chronic knee pain will flare up so badly they will not make it down. Baseball players who won’t pitch full speed because they do not want their shoulder pain to return. Fitness lovers who want to start working out but are afraid their back will go out again.

Do not be afraid! If you can learn to be aware of what is going on in your body, you may be able to figure out the source of your pain and keep it at bay. Follow these steps to help eliminate your fear of pain:

1. Stop Telling Your Body to Shut Up

Our bodies are incredible. They detect when the slightest things are off. Your body releases white blood cells when it detects an infection or virus. It creates scar tissue to protect an injury. Your body has reflexes, fight or flight responses, and countless functions that help you survive. Pain is a function of our bodies that let us know when something is WRONG. To let us know we are hurt.

We live in a society that tries to simply cover up this pain. We have cortisone shots (more on these in my next post), pain pills, and even surgeries used to cover the pain. Your elbow hurts? Here is a shot to numb it so you can’t feel it. Carpal tunnel? Well let’s go in surgically and just clip the ligament that’s hurting you. Relentless back pain? Time for multiple pills a day. Unfortunately, none of these methods go about fixing the problem, they simply are covering symptoms.

Your body is not trying to hurt you, it’s trying to help you. It’s letting you know that something is wrong. If you shut down your body’s ability to tell you what’s wrong, how can you possibly fix the pain or prevent it from getting worse?

2. Body Awareness is Not Just a Term for Yogis; Get Connected to Your Body

“Body awareness is an understanding of the parts that make up (your) body: where they are located, how they feel, and even what they can do” (https://study.com/academy/lesson/body-awareness-definition-explanation.html). It’s being able to notice how you are moving and what your body feels like as you do. It sounds so simple, but this is a concept I’ve seen many struggle with. Our bodies are constantly talking to us and giving us important information!

We need to teach ourselves to listen. For example, if you stretch your hamstring, what do you feel? Do you feel your muscles pulling in your hamstring only? Do you feel it all the way down into your calf? Does your lower back feel looser when you are finished stretching? If you have knee pain, what exact part of your knee hurts? Does that same hip feel stiff? Or your ankle? Practice putting what you are feeling in your body into words. Begin to notice how your body feels during certain times of the day and during certain activities.

This is so critical! Get in tune to exactly what you are feeling, where you are feeling it, and how it changes. Maybe your back hurts only after you’ve been sitting in the car for a long time. Or maybe your lower back hurt on your left side last week and this week it’s your right side. These observations will help you get in tune with your body and begin to decode its messages.

A few years ago, I had this terrible knee pain in my right knee while walking downhill while hiking that literally stopped me in my tracks. I noticed, however, that nothing else triggered that pain. I could squat, do box jumps, play volleyball…Pretty much the only thing I couldn’t do was hike downhill. So I knew that there was something about my gait during that activity that was causing my knee pain. I also noticed the pain was on the outside of my knee. This lead me to test out releasing the muscles on the outside of that leg to see if it helped.

3. Be Your Own Scientist

Time for a bomb drop: unless you just had an acute injury, such as a fall or accident, most pain is coming from fascia restriction, muscle tightness, and/or body misalignment. This means if you start testing out loosening your fascia and/or muscles, you can find out at the very least what is contributing to your pain (if not straight up eliminating it).

Start releasing parts of your body that are close to where you pain is located. For example, when the outside of my knee was hurting, I made sure to use a foam roller on the outside of my leg on my IT Band. Then I assessed: does my knee pain feel any better? Why yes, it does. I wonder if I used a foam roller to release the inside of my thigh? No, it’s about the same. Moving on. What if I spend a few minutes stretching my glute muscle? Yes that feels better! And so forth.

Whenever I am working on clients with significant pain, I always do one fascia release technique at a time. Then I ask, “what changed?” Now here’s where the body awareness comes in. If you walked in my office with low back pain at an 8 out of 10 on a pain scale, and we loosened one quadricep muscle and your pain dropped to a 4–well then, here we have something. Now you know that whenever your back begins acting up, the first thing to do is grab your foam roller and loosen that same quad.

If you try to foam roll your calf for knee pain and you notice that your knee was bothering you only 20% of your day instead of 80%, you are on to something. You get the idea.

Be your own scientist! Take notice of what specifically makes you feel better. You absolutely have the power of deduction to begin figuring out the source of your pain.

When you know what can make your pain recede, you take away the power that pain has over your life. If you know that loosening your IT Band will get rid of your knee pain, take a fascia release tool such as a lacrosse ball in your pack when you hike. I do this every time!

I am no longer afraid of knee pain because I know what fascia I need to release to make it feel better. I want this for you too. If you can practice being body aware, and then begin testing out fascia release techniques and stretches for what brings your pain down, you have the key! You don’t have to be afraid of the mystery. You don’t need to be afraid that you won’t be able to do the activities you love. Knowledge is indeed power, my friends.

If you need a nerd who is obsessed with pain patterns and finding the source of your pain for you, you can always give me a call. It has always been my mission to get you out of pain, figure out the source of the pain/or lack of mobility, and to educate you on how to keep it away. Schedule an appointment here.