In Pain? Is This Keeping You Stuck?

There's a BIG element to persistent or recurring pain that almost no one talks about, and most health professionals won't have considered.

If you're doing this thing it could be keeping you stuck in pain despite your best efforts to get out.

Your brain and nervous system will ALWAYS try to keep you safe. They will protect you by keeping you where it feels familiar, even if that's somewhere you don't logically don't want to be or like.

Familiar movement patterns, thoughts, sensations, emotions, habits end up feeling safe to you. so you stay there.

This is HUGE! 

Let's consider some situations where you'll see this in action:

1. You hate your job but you don't hand in your notice and resign
2. You long for a new life in the sun but it's never quite the right time to pack your bags and take that 1 way flight
3. A relationship has turned toxic beyond repair but you keep hanging on in there

All of these situations are uncomfortable, logically you know you should change your circumstances and yet nothing changes.

It makes no rational sense. Why on earth would you stay where you feel uncomfortable and unhappy!?

Because they've become familiar to you!

And familiar = being safe. BOOM!

Yes, being in pain can feel safer than not being in pain. This becomes more likely the longer pain persists.

Eventually pain and being in pain becomes your normal. You wake up and you expect to be in pain. You exercise and you expect pain as a result. You anticipate feeling pain when you do certain movements.

Your mind is telling your body to expect and feel pain. Your body does what your mind and nervous system tell it to do.

Listen carefully to the language you apply to yourself.

If you say "I have weak ankles", you're telling your body your ankles aren't strong.

If you say "I can't do lunges because they hurt my knees", you're telling your body that lunges are dangerous and they'll damage your knees.

If you say "my hips are tight", you're telling your body there's something wrong with your hips and the muscles will protect you by tensing.

You might desire to be out of pain, but if you haven't been pain free for a while this state will feel unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar = Unsafe.

So you repeat the familiar patterns - movements, thoughts, emotions, sensations, habits - even if they're contributing to your pain, because this feels safer to your nervous system than an unfamiliar, pain-free state.

How Can You Break This Pattern?

By making what you want familiar and what you already have unfamiliar.

You can do this in a variety of ways:

• Imagery - imagine vividly what it would feel like to move without pain. See yourself in your head doing the painful movements confidently and without pain.
• Language - say "my ankles are strong enough, I'm able to stand and walk so they are strong enough", or "I'm able to find a range of motion that my hips are comfortable with, I can find a way to move my hips without pain".
• Experience - consciously take your body into the movement pattern that creates muscle tension, then slowly come out of the movement and practice dialling that tension down to zero. Most importantly, stay in that place of zero tension so your brain and nervous system can assimilate this experience and begin to make it your new normal. This is the principle of pandiculation (also known as 'Nature's reset button').

Avoiding movements because you're worried they'll hurt or doing a movement and then stopping because it's too painful reinforces pain as your normal state of being and an inevitable consequence of that movement. In short, you're training pain and fear into your system.

Finding ways to move that don't hurt helps being pain-free a more normal and familiar state than being in pain. 

The BYB Method is a unique and effective system for finding lasting relief from pain. It addresses the many components that feed persistent and recurring pain.

The 4x pillars of The BYB Method are:

1. Body - simple explorations of movement patterns that your body is designed to do naturally but may have changed with lifestyle, work or injury
2. Breath - an easy breathing technique to reset the nervous system back to a state of safety and upregulate the parasympathetic nervous system for healing
3. Be - addressing your habitual beliefs, thought patterns, emotional patterns and response to pain, your body and movement
4. Bond - using connection to bring the nervous system back to a balanced, safe state

Most treatment protocols look at just 1 aspect of health or movement, but you are not a simple sum of your individual components. 

Every system of the body works together in synergy. 

Recovering from pain doesn't involve just fixing the site of the injury. You need to rebalance all of your systems in order to return to your pain-free state.

The BYB Method empowers you to explore what your body CAN do,, resets your beliefs and thought patterns about movement and enables you to take back control of your pain, so you feel safer and more confident in your body.

Takeaway

To find lasting relief from pain, you need to make being pain-free a more familiar state than being in pain.

NEXT STEPS

• Book into a Stretch, Yoga or Pilates class with me - these are a good introduction to The BYB Method
• Attend a mind-body retreat - these are deeply relaxing, fun, social small group experiences typically held in various locations within easy reach of Worthing, West Sussex. The next retreats are "Rest & Reflect" half-day winter retreat on Sunday 3rd December (FULL) and "Sun & Moon" mini retreat on Sunday 17th December (5x spaces). Click HERE to read more about them,
• Look out for new resources and workshops, coming soon to help you find your pain-free body
• Subscribe HERE to receive "The Movement Chronicle", a weekly e-newsletter delivering mobility and pain reduction tips directly into your inbox every Monday morning,

To find out more about my classes and retreats, or to join my email list you can contact me via any of these channels:

• Email at norma.pearson1@ntlworld.com
• DM me on Facebook Messenger 
• WhatsApp message to 07801 867361.