It can be strange to think that one word can change your pain, but it can. What is the word that has such power? The word is ‘No.’ It is short and simple but powerful that we often don’t realise how much it could help us with our pain.

When you listen to patient stories, you often find uncertainty as a driver of someone’s stress. Uncertainty means that wherever they focus on that situation, they find it difficult to resolve. Placing your focus on anything results in you attempting to bring meaning to it so that you understand it and feel comfortable with it.

Recovery is possible when sometimes it is thought to be impossible. Margaret describes how what was a minor injury, turned into a nightmare that physical and psychologically limited her far more than she could ever imagine. It took her on a journey of discovery that although incredibly painful, was one that became enlightening.

This Is A Common Question I Get Asked. Firstly, let's look at the activity causing the pain, and in your case, it's a 'small run'. You know this can't damage you, and we can be confident that what you are doing is not traumatising any physical tissue.

Here are three examples of how responses relating to pain can become conditioned. The effects of this can arise before, during or after a situation.

These responses are designed to warn you from what is being recognised by your brain and your body at that moment. It may be picking up cues that you haven’t even seen, acknowledged or noticed, and when the brain and body let you know, it can come as a real shock as it hits your conscious reality.

Does your pain get better when you have some sort of physical therapy? Some kind of treatment on it? Quite often, it does, but quite often, the pain comes back.

It's fascinating to hear stories of patients who describe massive pain without any physical injury or event. The pain is real, and it's as painful as if something traumatic has happened, but they should be telling you a different story for this much pain to come from nothing.

This post is going to highlight another piece of evidence to show how your brain can trigger pain. You feel it in your body. It’s a real pain, but the pain is driven by your brain's perception of something that's happening.

This is a short post that relates to Dr. Howard Schubiner's little tests that you can use clinically with a patient suffering from persistent or chronic pain. If you are a patient, then you can do this test yourself.

Here is the first of a series of posts about tips to show people that their brains influence their pain. Having more evidence to illustrate this to the patients and therapists can help change their beliefs about the origin of their pain.

This is a case study of a patient who had two years of biceps tendonitis, and this came on from overtraining in the gym. The physical overload of activity came through training six or seven times a week.

In this post, I’ll present a case study and explain how the patient was helped by understanding the basis of their pain and how they could reverse it.

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.

The post gives you an example of how it's relatively easy to condition yourself to feel less pain. These things happen naturally without us even thinking about it, but sometimes you make a conscious effort to prepare yourself to do something that you might enjoy.

Here’s a little scenario about the experience of learning pain in a two-year-old child. I just want to give you the description or observation of something I noticed in the clinic whilst they observed someone else receiving treatment.

When you have persistent pain, work can feel harder than ever. Not only do you have work to deal with, but you also have to deal with it in pain. It can feel a never-ending cycle of pain - work - more pain.

Irrespective of what you believe to be the underlying cause of your pain, your behaviours can contribute to the persistence of it, without you even realising it.

There's a disparity between the number of people who suffer pain when you compare women and men. When you look at persistent and chronic pain this varies across different conditions but on the whole, women suffer more chronic pain than men.

The part of your brain where pain sits in the unconscious part of your mind.

It’s something that is triggered by unconscious mechanisms as a protective measure, to provide feedback so that we become consciously aware of the sensation in order to attend to it.

Many of the approaches to persistent pain are barking up the wrong tree. They’re well-intentioned and well-meaning and partially well targeted. The fact that the sights of the treatment are not correctly set means that whatever that treatment is, it can never be truly effective if it isn’t focusing and the main aspect which is driving someone’s pain.

There’s something very powerful that happens when people join a group. Especially if it’s a group that is offering change. So joining a group where change is possible is only worthwhile if you believe in the possibility of change.