10 Steps To Retraining Your Brain Out Of Pain
Chronic pain is a common occurrence and one of the most misunderstood experiences we can have as humans. Many people believe pain is always a direct result of illness or injury, but neuroscience research shows that pain is much more complex. In fact, the brain plays the main role in creating the pain experience.
When pain becomes chronic, it is usually because the brain and nervous system have become “stuck” in a heightened state of protection, even long after tissues have healed.
Recovering from chronic pain — also known as tension myositis syndrome (TMS) or neuroplastic pain — is simple, but it isn't easy. For most people, it takes time and repetition, just as it did for me. We have to learn new ways of responding to pain and other stressors in our lives, shifting our default reaction from fear to safety. Many people have done this, myself included, and you can too.
When I was first learning how to recover from chronic pain and fatigue, I wrote this post and
10 steps to retraining your brain out of pain
Understand pain education. The symptoms are there to keep you safe.
Begin a daily practice to calm your nervous system and tune into your body.
Stop compromising yourself. If you feel like you should but don’t want to, don't, if at all possible.
Tame your critical voice. Notice how you talk to yourself and pressure yourself.
Stop people pleasing. Do what is best for you first, always. You will have more energy to help others when needed.
Learn the true meaning of self-care.
Strive for excellence, not perfection. When you strive for excellence and fail, you practice self-compassion. When you strive for perfection (which is impossible) and fail, you beat yourself up.
Give your brain more safety messages than danger messages. Remind yourself that your symptoms are safe. There is nothing wrong. You are overall safe and are slowly teaching your primitive brain this.
Focus on what brings you joy and contentment. Instead of focusing on what is wrong in your life, begin to start focusing on what is going well and what brings you joy.
Give yourself loads of self-compassion on your recovery journey.
Improving one of these steps will often improve the others. If you stop people-pleasing, you will also compromise yourself less. Those of us with TMS often overextend ourselves. We take on more than what is best for us. It might work for your friend, but it is too much for you, and that is okay.
pain education
Understanding pain education can get you well on your path to healing. In fact, there have been folks who have healed just from this knowledge. In the case of neuroplastic pain, there's nothing to fix. Nothing is physically wrong. No more doctors, physical therapy, or nutritionists.
You can stop working so hard. Take a breath. The primitive brain is running the show, keeping us preoccupied with pain, fatigue, or other TMS symptoms, all on autopilot.
TMS happens when the body is fine, but the brain signals pain anyway. It's a mistake, made with good intentions: the brain is always trying to keep us safe, and pain is sometimes its go-to tool. That's useful when we sprain an ankle or touch a hot stove; pain protects us from further harm. But sometimes the brain sounds that same alarm when nothing is actually wrong.
childhood patterns
Because of how we were wired as children, our primitive brain believes that these symptoms keep us safe and will do anything to keep us in this fear/pain/fear cycle. We will have these symptoms as long as the fear/primitive brain is in charge.
As mentioned above, the pain is just a false warning signal. The brain is just making a mistake. We can disregard it.
Fight/Flight/Freeze Fawn
People who feel safe don’t have this issue. Their rational brain is in charge most of the time, and their fear brain takes over mostly only when there is a real threat. After the danger is resolved, they go out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn, and their rational brain
takes over again.
When people feel chronically unsafe, their primitive brains are in charge most of the time. The brain gets kicked into this high alert state, and after a while, it just stays there. They don’t have near the access to their rational brain, so the rational brain takes a back seat.
Things seem bigger than they are. Everything seems so important. It interprets things as dangerous when they are safe. We take life too seriously. It sends out false warnings, and we react to the false alarm by fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning. We scare ourselves.
When we fight, we resist. We don’t want it. We grapple with it. When we flee, we run from the pain, or whatever it is we are afraid of. It might be thoughts or feelings. When we freeze, we are numb, not feeling, or not in our own experience. When we fawn, we become small, lesser; we people-please.
To treat and heal from TMS, we need to get our brains out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode and teach our brains how to live in peace and calm.
To treat and heal from chronic pain, we must calm down the fear brain.
Practices for chronic pain recovery
Daily practice of some or all of the above techniques can help you gain awareness and obtain some control over your primitive brain. It is best to work these techniques with an energy of ease and lightness. We don’t have to do them perfectly. A few minutes of practice a day adds up.
Breathing Techniques
I have used all of the above techniques over the years. Deep breathing is one of my favorites, and many other breathing techniques are on YouTube. I recommend a short practice, such as this deep breathing exercise. Short practices are sustainable. It just takes a brief pause in your day to get centered or grounded.
Meditation
This 5-minute noticing meditation is a great way to get out of your head and into your body to feel more relaxed.
Journaling
I have been journaling for years to help myself become more aware of my thoughts, feelings, reactions, and responses. Five minutes of writing down whatever comes to mind each day was so important for me to see my fear patterns on paper. Journaling served as a gateway to my rational brain.
Somatic Tracking
Somatic Tracking is probably the most helpful tool for reducing or eliminating fear of pain sensations. It’s also used for emotional awareness. I have listened to this podcast, Tell Me About Your Pain, many times to help me understand somatic tracking and practice it on myself.
Inner Child Work
Treating TMS is like a reparenting process. I consider my unconscious mind or my fear brain my inner child. As children, most of us who deal with chronic pain are conditioned to perceive life through a lens of danger, which happens through adverse childhood experiences.
Inner child work is working with this part of our brain and reparenting it to realize it is safe and can actually feel safe. I think the best way to do this is to make a daily practice of talking to and comforting your child self through visualization. Getting used to doing this takes practice, but it is very powerful and highly healing.
A Pain-Free Life
We can slow down and retrain our brain out of pain by doing the daily practices above and learning how to respond to false alarms with greater ease. Just knowing that it’s a false alarm makes it less scary. We know it’s safe. We notice it, become curious about it, and have compassion for ourselves, the inner child that is suffering. Now, the rational brain starts to take over.
The more we keep recognizing that the fear brain is sending out false alarms and that there really is no danger, the more the fear will start to dissipate and send out fewer false alarms. They become fewer and fewer, and the rational brain is in charge most of the time.
Now, the fear brain only takes over when there is an actual 911 danger. It doesn’t send out too many false alarms. After the danger is resolved, the brain goes out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, and the rational brain is back in charge.
Once the rational brain is in charge, we have choices and can now choose how we respond to the threats in our lives. We begin to choose our best life instead of our default life.
This is how we heal from TMS and how we change our default from responding with fear to responding with ease and safety, which sends safety signals instead of danger signals to our brains, turning down pain.
How do you want your life to be?
For more information about how to retrain your brain out of pain, read My Recovery Story.
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