TO YOUR HEALTH
ing the arm at all, try bending it at the elbow. Notice the discomfort and how the arm shakes as you have two opposing muscle groups at work. Relax your arm. Tense muscles contribute to pain; and over time, they become conditioned to shorten and tighten, and movement becomes uncom- fortable. Tight muscles also reduce blood flow to the area. When you make a tight fist, for example, notice how the color of your clenched fist begins to change compared to the other hand due to the restricted blood flow to the area. If you were to keep your hand in a tight fist, you would eventually experience discomfort and perhaps pain, as the lack of blood flow deprives the tissues of oxygen and nutrients. The same principle applies to drunk individuals who fall down but often escape with less injuries than if a sober person has fallen. Why?! Because sober individuals frequently tense their muscles and bodies when they fall, unlike the drunk individual. Life is movement, and all life moves. The less we move, the more we hasten our end. You cannot even maintain good cardiac health without movement, or flexibility of musculature. By paying constant attention to their pain, patients become sen - sory experts on their pain experience, much like gourmet food crit- ics or sommeliers who have developed their olfactory and gustatory sensibilities to a fine art. It is important to realize how learning is a physiological phenomenon as well; how in a neural synapse, in the synaptic cleft with constant stimulation, the dendrite and axon grow closer together, and over time it takes less of an impulse to trigger transmission of a pain signal. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the importance of the patients’ beliefs in chronic pain. Some of the factors shown to play
It becomes a vicious cycle. When one has persistent pain, it is about hurting; rarely is the pain indicative of harm. Again, realize hurt does not equal harm. Unfortunately, being in a negative emotional state is to pain the way gasoline is to fire. You have had experiences when something negative was happening in your life making you angry or upset and noticed how difficult it was to get away from the pain. However, when you were engaged in something meaningful, or distracted with some- thing funny or amusing that made you smile, in that time the pain was not at the center of your experience. When we are distressed, whatever stressor we are grappling with consumes our brain’s mental resources, our attention, concentration, etc. Our biochemistry also changes with each mood state; negative moods have a distinct, different biochemi - cal signature than positive or neutral moods. Furthermore, when we are stressed, our sympathetic nervous system becomes activated. We experience an increase in heart rate, and in adrenaline and cortisol throughout our system, which can heighten our awareness of the pain. To use a computer metaphor — we have only so much biological RAM, and pain requires lots of resources to not keep it at the forefront of our operating systems, i.e., consciousness. Dealing with chronic pain is exhausting. Physiology of Pain We human beings are bags of water with lots of chemicals float - ing around. Sixty percent of our body weight is water. When we are relaxed, we are more fluid-like; when we are tense, we are more in a solid state, like ice. By way of demonstration: lift one of your arms (one not injured or hurting) parallel to the floor; make the whole arm as rigid as you can, tightening all the muscles. Next, without relax-
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PATHWAYS—Fall 24—19
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