Exciting Emotions Causing Pain
Today I’m just going to explain how something good can cause pain.
We assume that pain comes from doing something bad. We associate pain with something not good for us, which can be true in many cases.
Pain is just a protective mechanism to alert us to something that may be dangerous. We may define that thing, creating that alarm as bad, and we can recognise that, but sometimes pain protects us from something that we see as good.
Now it's good because it can give us pleasure. We define it as good because it provides us with that satisfaction, but you can have too much of a good thing. Your body regulates the behaviour that you enjoy, but if it recognises that the actions are too intense for too long and you're just not allowing yourself some rest, it can use pain to stop you.
Quite often, it uses warnings that come before pain to tell you that you've had enough or to say to you that you've done enough of that thing that you're enjoying but enjoying too much. If you’ve ever looked at excited children, you've often seen them burn out. You know they're enthusiastic about the birthday or excited about a party or this thing that's coming soon, and eventually, they're just exhausted.
That's simply their system telling them that they can't stay in the excitable state for too long because of what it does to other body systems. The focus is on something good, which happens in all of us, so pain protects us from ourselves even though we think what we're doing is good. When someone presents with a painful physical situation, a physical problem, the pain system is sensitised to anything that will threaten that organism.
Anything that threatens further overloading that organism can be a trigger, and that includes more stress through good or harmful situations.
Back Pain and Sciatica
I had this example in the clinic of a lady who had an episode of back pain and sciatica. She’d had it for several months, but there was no physical trauma related to it. The pain was severe, and she’d had it a while. She felt physically overloaded, but with tasks that she's done without then usually causing an issue. However, she had many additional stresses within the family on top of this.
That had been the tipping point. That presentation was back pain and leg pain, so there are physical elements to her presentation. A description of pain, a sense of overwhelm, and overload bring it to the point where pain shuts the organism down without trauma.
The pain was severe, yet there was no physical trauma to account for it. You might see that as a trapped nerve, a muscle spasm or a slipped disc. These are just concepts that people label that simply validates them taking time off—given by medical practitioners, physios, doctors, nurses, therapists, patients themselves or even family members.
I had spoken to her, treated her and got her to modulate activity, listened to her body do regular exercises, and was recovering. She had set time out for herself, was creating boundaries to set the scene so she can recover, and she was doing well.
Point of the Post
Now here's the exciting point of this article. The patient was more or less symptom-free in between one of the sessions. The back pain had settled, the leg pain had resolved, and she was happy with how she was progressing. When she came back to the clinic, she described a flare-up.
A flare-up is where the pain comes back. Often with back pain, this can happen with an apparent physical trigger such as gardening, lifting, or bending. These physical links give the patient a bit of meaning as to why that might happen again.
A physical movement causing physical pain is not structural damage again, but it's easy for the patient to understand why that could happen. It’s probably a slight bit overloading for where they are in their recovery, which shouldn't frighten them too much if they understand that.
When pain comes back without trauma, without a new episode, or any apparent physical element to link it with pain, it's pretty scary for the patient because the pain has no apparent meaning.
That lack of understanding is a trigger for more stress, so if you can explain what's happening to them in a way that they understand, it's a much less scary experience. They can modulate any fear they feel and know why it happens.
The lady came back to the clinic with her husband. He said, ‘We don't understand why her pain came back so bad? It was last Saturday, and she wasn’t doing anything?’. Because she wasn't, she wasn't physically doing anything doesn’t mean she wasn’t doing anything. He described that she was sitting, and suddenly, the pain went through the roof pain.
The back pain, the leg pair, and she cried with its intensity. Yet, she had been okay for a few days. Recovering from an episode several months of pain and both he and his wife we puzzled about how that flare-up could have happened.
What is the trigger?
We established that there was no physical overload to cause it. You could say that sitting could have done it, and yes, it can happen in the very acute phases, but the patient hadn't sat for that long, and you'd generally get a warning before excruciating pain, so it wasn't the sitting itself.
I asked her, ‘What were you doing while you were sitting? What were you thinking about?’. She explained that she took a phone call from a family member she hadn't spoken to for a while. The information that came on the telephone was that she would be getting married, and it was an exciting thing to hear and excellent news.
The subsequent outcome of that was that this lady would be going to the wedding next year. The call ended, and within a few minutes, the pain was through the roof in this lady's back and her leg.
I asked her, “how did you feel about the phone call?’. She said, ‘I was so excited!”.
The brain and body of a person who feels excited start to project the event’s feelings and experience them in real-time.
This could happen from focusing on what the wedding will look like and what travelling is involved. What the outfit will be or what arrangements need making.
The anticipation of the event brings it to life long before it arrives. If you've ever looked forward to going on holiday or anything like that, you feel your excitement rise before you get there. That's simply the stress chemicals rising in the body preparing you for what you’re focusing on. That is excitement.
Excitement Was a Threat
The brain and the body of that person, who's already coming out of a painful episode linked to stress, see that as a threat because it's simply regulating the number of stress chemicals in the body. It doesn’t matter whether that is related to something perceived as good or bad, excitement or fear.
Both add to a sense of overload. The best way for the organism to stop or shut down that overload is pain, even if its due to excitement.
Usually, the best way to do it, it's to get the person to listen to the earlier signals that generally come with that to moderate that excitement. But if they're already in a heightened state, if they're already on amber rather than green, then it doesn't need much of a trigger for the pain to come back.
Once a penny dropped for this lady and her husband, it made complete sense. We'd had some time to talk about the influence of stress and negative elements triggering pain. I then explained that the brain’s unconscious part does not know the difference between a negative and positive emotion.
It just regulates the amount of stress which comes with an emotion. If the system is still heightened and excitement appears, we can often happily focus on that event because we see in as enjoyable. However, we don’t realise or recognise that it stimulates and influences us too much in the present moment.
As the stress flows during the moment of thought, it reduces our ability to feel the present moment’s reality.
We’re enjoying the thought and the anticipation of the event, and our minds are in the future. We’re enjoying that process, and we are, but when you focus on it, you can switch off how you feel for a short period.
Once you take your focus off the point in time and the stress chemical that came with those thoughts subside, that is when you regain the awareness of what you are currently feeling. And after those neural pathways creating pain are stimulated through the excitement, they fire more frequently and more intensely, because of that neurochemical level present danger of further overload to the organism in its current state.
All About Protection
In its protective attempt to prevent you from returning to focus on anything that does that again, it starts to claw back its control with fatigue or with pain.
What's the reason for the flare-up in this lady. The most significant danger here, and unfortunately with many who end up in the constant pain cycle, is that they see that experience of pain, not with the understanding that the pain relates to the stress chemicals flushing through their system. They see that pain as an indication of damage or proof that it still exists.
And when that perception appears, it repeats the driver to increase stress through fear, frustration, anger, resentment, or regret, and the cycle repeats.
Often having an awareness of that is all that is needed, and it helped this patient Drop back into all the habitual things she’d started to relearn to help herself recover. The thoughts of looking after herself, the breathing patterns to match that, the movements that contextually help that part of her back and leg, and the feelings to take back control.
This lady now understands that stress is good and bad. You can't be immune to either. It’s what life is about and balancing out those two elements and also with other non-stressful things in life.
It is essential to tap into things that naturally and effortlessly allow us to rest, digest, repair and renew without effort.
That’s the balance that gives health, and that's the balance that is essentially pain-free. That is independent of any structural changes that might be present in somebody's body. Find that balance, and you can find it pain-free.
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