Understanding your pain
Why does my pain continue when there is nothing to fix?
The Flippin’ Pain™ Formula – Everything matters when it comes to pain
Our body’s internal alarm system (or nervous system) has become very sensitive and on guard to anything that it perceives as a ‘threat’. The longer your nervous system produces pain, the better it gets at producing it. This means that our body can learn pain. Touch and simple everyday movements are experienced as pain. Nerves, out of efficiency, start ‘communicating with each other’. People often say that pain feels like it is spreading.
With persisting pain, patients describe the unpredictable, ‘never ending’ and ‘invisible’ nature of the pain which makes it very difficult to cope with. Changes in pain such as flare ups are very common and can be triggered by things like poor sleep, tension, stress, worries, low mood, inactivity or unaccustomed activity.
Key message: Lots of things influence the pain we experience, including some things we consciously control, but also many others that we don’t, such as our past experiences, our levels of stress or worry and fatigue.