Summary:
In this video series we’ve been learning about how chronic pain and associated suffering develop. The idea is to understand the chronic processes, so that you can make choices about how to reverse them and reclaim your sense of well-being and ability to function and live your life. The previous videos in this series shared how the body-mind “learns” chronic pain. You can also “unlearn” chronic pain. This video continues to explain how that process works. I spoke in previous videos about the biological processes that are involved in the development of chronic pain. Have a look at those if you haven’t seen them yet. You can see those posts HERE. We discussed how protective responses are built into the pain processing and movement control systems of your body-mind. These processes get knocked “off the rails” by certain factors. And persistent pain leads to gradual changes in those systems that can unfortunately make pain worse. It’s like vicious cycles, where the pain system gets sensitized, and the movement control system stops working as well. So movement hurts, and pain spreads. It’s richer than that, as persistent pain and the resulting stress-response lead to measurable changes in gene expression, hormonal regulation, cellular energy production, emotional regulation, immune balance, and gastrointestinal function. And these all feed back into one another and can increase pain. So there is this snowball effect, where vicious cycles of biological relationships propagate forward and create the disease of chronic pain. The good news is that many of those changes can be reversed. In my experience, your own mind/body connection is a crucial place to start the changes. One great place to start is by developing the quality of ‘mindfulness”, which starts to shift the reactivity of the protective responses. Just like your brain-body learns chronic pain, mindfulness can start the process of unlearning.Did You Know:
- Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation in CT, NJ, and Florida, as well as worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness. His US-based consultations are offered in conjunction with Rose Wellness to enhance the quality of care and ease of your experience as a patient. Contact the office or schedule a consultation at Rose Wellness. For international consultations contact www.drshiller.com.
- Movement Toward Health is an affordable and effective training program to teach you to heal and feel better and improve your functioning. It will teach you to integrate breathing techniques, mindfulness, and mindful movement techniques that are drawn from Dr Shiller’s 30+ years learning, practicing, and teaching these approaches to people suffering chronic pain and chronic illness. To get more info and be notified of the next start date CLICK HERE.
- Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
Related Posts:
- https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-1/
- https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-2/
Full Transcript:
As mindfulness develops, you start to notice stuff, you become more aware, because you start to develop your ability to pay attention and receive what is there. You start to notice, “Gosh, I’m spending most of my life filtering through my thoughts and beliefs about what’s going to happen instead of actually seeing what’s going to happen” and almost everybody that goes down this path is like struck by that, “Oh my gosh, I was living in fantasy and I’m starting to touch living in reality” and part of that is you start to touch the sweetness and goodness of life, you start to smell and touch and taste things that are beautiful. We will talk about that in the next part, because that is really important, but for now, we are talking about kind of inhibiting the negative patterns, because that is the other aspect of what we do, it is kind of like I said, stopping these unproductive reactive habits about your mind and your thinking, your nutritional habits, your posture, your bodily habits, what you do in the world, and it is not like you are being forced by some sort of blaming conscious and shitting yourself, like what is wrong with you, do not you know you should not do that, that is not the game, because what happens is you just start to pay attention and you just forgive everything and you just choose to be grateful and you let go and you practice letting go and being present, and what arises naturally is just a clear choice, like, “I don’t want to eat that stuff or gosh this person in my life is toxic. I want to do something different because I’m, so much negativity there or gosh look at all my own toxic thoughts, how can I be with that and let go of them” S Mindfulness practice develops this observer, that starts to notice the negativity and you naturally start to just say, “No, thank you” and you naturally become more forgiving with yourself and forgiving with other people. You naturally start to like accept your life as it is and that does not mean it is never going to change, but you are less reactive to the things that are difficult, that used to grab you and pull you into severe suffering, and it is remarkable the changes that just happen naturally that I have been privileged to witness with other people. You know it is kind of like there is concrete and then suddenly the grass grows through the crack somehow, like there is life in there that wants to come out. One example, there is a fellow that I worked with, his name is Bill, and he was a recovered alcoholic, but really struggling with cravings, a lot of difficult emotional stuff in his life, and every day was like a war to not drink, and you know we were practicing one day and Bill basically says, “I really have the urge to drink” and I said, well, okay, so what else are you experiencing? He said, well, I feel tight in my chest and I feel irritable, my back hurts. Okay, and what about the emotions? I feel irritated, I feel angry with you for asking me all these stupid questions. So, I said okay, so how about just sit with what you are experiencing, sit with the difficult emotions, just observe them and be with them, notice what they feel like, do not try to change them, just agree because that is what is happening. He sits there for like a minute and a half and then like a smile comes on his face, like why are you smiling? He’s like, well those emotions were really hard and then they just kind of went away, and I do not feel like I need to drink anymore. That was a discovery, it was something that just came to him through observing his own life, and I could give you so many examples of things like that in my own life, in the life of so many patients, where it just comes from paying attention with compassion, dropping the judgment, forgiving, being present and cultivating this part of you that actually kind of hovers above your emotional self and your bodily self and is with you all the time, and it is an expression of a deep inner intelligence, and it is your healing intelligence and that is the power of doing that kind of training to unwind these pathways of mind, emotion, and physiologic reactivity that perpetuate and develop this process of chronic pain and chronic illness, and so, as you practice and train yourself to be aware with compassion and with discernment, things start to change spontaneously, you start to just, you know, you may have lived your whole life in patterns of reactivity that are mental, emotional, and physical, and you start to notice them and they start to kind of get lighter and get less heavy and you start to have more freedom of choice, and it is from practice, it is relearning, it is rewiring, nerves that fire together wire together. When I have that experience of tasting the irritation that once created reactivity, and I choose to just be with it and let it be there and say yes, it is happening, I agree this is what is up, letting go the judgment, then I am turning off the reactivity, it is like, I am uncoupling it, you know, it is those two nerves, there is the irritated and then there is the reactive nerve, right? I am irritated, so then I get emotional, and I am basically saying, “No, I’m not believing you anymore, you are just a habit. I don’t need to get reactive when that happens” and then you start to actually uncouple your physical, emotional, mental experience from your ability to choose to have the kind of experience you want to have, and that changes your physiology, it changes your neural networks, it changes your gene expression, because you are living in a more calm, clear, connected state, where you are not as reactive. We talked about how there can be setbacks and how a person can be learning to live in a calm or clear state of mind and body but then something happens that like knocks him on the ground, knocks him back into the hole or they fall in the water, so to speak metaphorically, so what is that about, how do you deal with that? We talked a bit how just being mindful gradually that happens less and you develop the capacity to respond more effectively when it does happen, but the other thing is that there is deeper kinds of work than just sitting there and being mindful of what is going on. There is deeper work that involves getting therapeutic support, whether it is with an individual or a group or in your own inner work and intentionally going in and meeting the dark places inside, because a lot of us, most human beings, we have had experiences of profound disappointment of hurt, of trauma, of fear, times when we felt like we were disconnected and it just was not okay and, you know, there is a language for this in various psychotherapeutic and spiritual traditions, but the point is meeting those places and evoking various tools for actually doing a deeper level of work, to reclaim that part of yourself and to free up the deeply held protective responses that you might have in your heart or your body, that is profound work as well. It is a little bit beyond the context or it is a little bit beyond the scope of this video. So, I am not going to go there now, but that is something else to think about and talk about, because a lot of people with chronic pain and illness have trauma. We know that early life trauma is a huge part of what influences people to develop chronic pain and chronic illness and healing that trauma can be a profound influence on all of these physiologic processes, because what it does is sort of uncouples or discharges or disengages these deeply held patterns that said, “danger” and it is about healing those, so that your whole system can be more at ease in that rest, and there is techniques for learning that. Okay, so let us make a break now and we have talked really about the process of sort of saying no and uncoupling and unlearning negative protective responses, and we also want the process of installing and learning and actually awakening healing responses. So, we will talk about that in the next vid, hope you tune in.Join my email community and get notified about new content and transformative self-healing skills.
Unlearning Negative Mind Body Patterns That Create Pain and Illness: Part 1
Posted on by Andrew David Shiller, MD
Summary:
In this video series we’ve been learning about how chronic pain and associated suffering develop. The idea is to understand the chronic processes, so that you can make choices about how to reverse them and reclaim your sense of well-being and ability to function and live your life. The previous videos in this series shared how the body-mind “learns” chronic pain. You can also “unlearn” chronic pain. This video begins to explain how. I spoke in previous videos about the biological processes that are involved in the development of chronic pain. Have a look at those if you haven’t seen them yet. You can see those posts HERE. We discussed how protective responses are built into the pain processing and movement control systems of your body-mind. These processes get knocked “off the rails” by certain factors. And persistent pain leads to gradual changes in those systems that can unfortunately make pain worse. It’s like vicious cycles, where the pain system gets sensitized, and the movement control system stops working as well. So movement hurts, and pain spreads. It’s richer than that, as persistent pain and the resulting stress-response lead to measurable changes in gene expression, hormonal regulation, cellular energy production, emotional regulation, immune balance, and gastrointestinal function. And these all feed back into one another and can increase pain. So there is this snowball effect, where vicious cycles of biological relationships propagate forward and create the disease of chronic pain. The good news is that many of those changes can be reversed. In my experience, your own mind/body connection is a crucial place to start the changes. One great place to start is by developing the quality of ‘mindfulness”, which starts to shift the reactivity of the protective responses. Just like your brain-body learns chronic pain, mindfulness can start the process of unlearning.Did You Know:
- Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation in CT, NJ, and Florida. worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness. His US-based consultations are offered in conjunction with Rose Wellness to enhance the quality of care and ease of your experience as a patient. Contact the office or schedule a consultation at Rose Wellness.
- Movement Toward Health is an affordable and effective training program to teach you to heal and feel better and improve your functioning. It will teach you to integrate breathing techniques, mindfulness, and mindful movement techniques that are drawn from Dr Shiller’s 30+ years learning, practicing, and teaching these approaches to people suffering chronic pain and chronic illness. To get more info and be notified of the next start date CLICK HERE.
- Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
Related Posts:
- https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-1/
- https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-2/
Full Transcript:
All right, so in the last video, we talked about how chronic pain and illness are processes that gradually develop over time, that genetics and life experiences and various triggers can start this process, and that your biology shifts, your system, your mind body system so to speak practices various protective and maladaptive responses and that is built into your neural networks, so practicing it over time, your system learns it and it becomes kind of set, and that is affecting your neurologic activities and emotional and mental responses, your neuromuscular functioning of your motor system, your gastrointestinal system, your hormones, your immune system. To varying degrees, those are all influenced, because it is all one system, and it is all working together, presumably to protect you from danger but effectively to generate these secondary problems of chronic pain and chronic illness. The system gets unbalanced, the neural networks change, gene expression can change, and the outcome is chronic pain and chronic illness, and just like it can be learned, it can be unlearned, and so this video is going to start talking about how do you help the healing process, how do you unlearn chronic pain, how do you relearn health? Healing is a learning process, it is about the conscious choices that you make on a daily basis, lifestyle, behavior, habits, thought patterns, mindset. You could break it into three parts, because I like to do that to make it easier and they are called three M’s, there is your mind body system, your metabolic or biochemical system, and your motor or your movement system, and all of those are ways that you can kind of grab hold of your physiology and on a regular consistent basis start to shift your physiology towards health. Obviously there is a lot to unpack there, but the point is that you really need to think about it as I am taking charge of my health. I am not expecting someone to fix me. I am not looking for an overnight miracle that suddenly I am going to be better. What I am looking for is gradual change over time that happens, because I have made conscious choices, and I have been doing stuff to help my mind body system to optimize my metabolic system, nutrition, inflammation, all of that, and to actually use the power of my movement system to help my body heal. This whole aspect of retraining and unlearning pain and illness and relearning health. There are these two parts of aspects of unlearning the bad stuff and learning the good stuff, pretty simple, right? Let us start by talking about unlearning the bad stuff and you got to start that conversation by talking about stress and almost everybody now knows that you have a stress response and you have a relaxation response, this is physiology that has been demonstrated for 50 years and interventions to evoke the relaxation response have been tested over and over and over again in so many different realms of health and showing their benefit, because they balance that system out. You are meant to go through stress in life, life is not meant to be stress-free despite what the magazines tell you, but the point is, you have stress and then you have relaxation, and the system is in balance. Most of us in our current time are stressed, there is a lot of difficult things going on in the world, and if you have got chronic pain, chronic illness, there is a protective stress response going on and you probably like overdoing it on the stress response and under-doing the relaxation response. Simple techniques, there is a bunch of different ones, can actually evoke the relaxation response, and lots of research showing us that those are beneficial in a variety of different kinds of conditions and situations, to enhance well-being, to help people cope with pain, to reduce the effects of chronic illness in various ways on various organ systems. The key is consistency. We are talking about a learning model. We are talking about the body has practiced for months or years, an unbalanced stress response and all of that influences in the whole body-wide system, and so what you are looking at doing is shifting that, and that means consistency, nerves that fire together wire together, you want to shift your neural networks, you want to bathe your whole body and mind in biochemistry that starts to shift gene expression overtime. You want to try to do it on a regular basis. Hopefully that all makes sense, but there are a couple of problems with relaxation training. I have been teaching meditation for a lot of years, and what I hear over and over again from a lot of people is, “doc, I try to relax and I get more tense.” It is a really common thing, because you know what, if I am trying to do something, I am not relaxing, effort is the opposite of relaxing, and what you could say is stress is when we are trying to put an unbalanced force on something, an absence of stress is just stopping, it is effortless, there is no effort, there is no trying to get anywhere, and so a lot of the relaxation response methods that are sort of like active, “Hey, you are going to relax,” they can trip a person up that way. If it works for you, great, do it. In my own experience, just simply bringing the awareness to the present moment, bringing awareness to the sensual experience of life, bodily sensations, breathing, sounds, textures, even the taste of food, that is all about bringing your awareness and your consciousness into the here and now, and there is not stress here and now. Mental emotional stress comes from future and past; it comes from comparing and thinking and striving and yearning and trying, and when you just bring your awareness into the here and now, the whole system starts to calm down and relax. In my experience, that is often a big change for people who are sort of stuck in the “I can’t meditate, I can’t relax.” Okay, so do not meditate, do not relax, just pay attention in a structured way, just notice what you are experiencing, notice your breathing, let your breathing be like waves coming in from the sea and rolling up on the shore and rolling out to the sea. It is an experiential process. The second big challenge with relaxation and stress management in general is what I have heard from so many people, which is, “I feel great when I am doing it, but then as soon as I get back to life, wow, everything hits me and suddenly like I am back into the vortex, and I am into the reactivity” and you know whatever it is, like the wife or the husband or the co-worker who does something unkind or the pain flare or the financial issues that trigger something, and before you know it, you have fallen back in the hole. So, what do you do about that? One of the first things you do about that is realize that it is totally normal, if you have been practicing being in a reactive stress state for months or years, then your body is used to it, that is what we are talking about here, we are trying to change physiologic habits, and it can take time, and it is totally normal that you get pulled back into the challenging stuff. There is a deeper level to this if you start really thinking about the structure of a human being and a human soul, which is that we often have areas in our deeply held experience in our heart, even in our bodily memory that are associated with painful traumatic experiences, and until we start to actually unravel that and unwind that, they are going to still pull, they are going to pull our attention, they are going to pull our physiology, they are going to have a pull on your emotional experiences. That is where it gets a bit deeper, because the idea of bringing your attention and your awareness to the present moment experience, yes, it can be very relaxing, but there is a deeper process. What happens is you develop this quality of your own mind that is able to be present, and you actually gradually condition your mind and your emotions to observe what is going on without getting sucked into the drama, without getting sucked into the judgments and the habits of self-blame, self-judgment, criticism of self or others and the emotional reactivity that they create. In my own experience and what I have witnessed with so many people, there is this process by which the awareness develops overtime, there is a part of your mind and soul that is elevated above your emotional reactivity, and you develop it, you build it, you condition it, you teach it, you learn it by practicing it, and that is why the real benefits from meditation happen from practice. By doing it on a consistent basis, by observing, by being present, by letting go of the reactivity, by falling off and getting sucked into it and then letting go again. It is a training process whereby you are essentially saying to your whole being, I am paying attention, and I am here, and I am not going to go down those pathways, I am saying no essentially to the normal reactivity, like I am sitting there and breathing, and I am paying attention, and I notice the thought that comes up that often triggers me, and I choose to just let it go. I notice an emotion that might come up, that might trigger me, maybe it is sadness or fear, and I just choose to hold it; I decide to compassionately relate to it. Okay, there is a difficult emotion, I am feeling fear, I am experiencing pain, let me just be present to that as if it was a little child who needed my loving care and attention and hold it in my heart without getting into the whole reactive, oh my gosh, how’s it going to change, I can’t live like this. The things, the habits of reactivity that naturally become part of our being when we are dealing with chronic pain and illness can be unlearned and that is really what mindfulness training is about, there is a lot of different layers to it, but the basic idea is developing awareness and consciousness that are present, discerning, and compassionate. Which means I understand why this could happen, with all the different things that have gone on in life that have happened to me, that have happened to the world, of course, this is what is happening right now. I am falling back into fear and irritation and anger. I am slipping into chronic pain. I have been rehearsing it for 10 years. Okay, I am noticing it, I am letting go, I am not getting caught in the spiral, and what happens is that there is this part of your mind or your brain or your being depending on who you want to think about it, that you develop, and it gets called mindfulness in some circles, in the teachings of Torah and Kabbalah, it is the higher soul, it is the Neshama, the part of us that is just present to our life experience and can connect our sort of lower needs and drives with our higher aspirations, and it is your biggest ally in healing. Many of the people who I serve appreciate shorter videos, because it is easy to absorb that way, and we are going to continue to learn about unlearning pain, but I am we will just to take a break here and continue in the next video, you can find that whether on the blog or on the YouTube page or elsewhere, just look for the next number in the sequence and please join me there, please share if you find this interesting, and talk to you soon.Join my email community and get notified about new content and transformative self-healing skills.
Why Does Chronic Pain Happen? These Scientific Principles Can Empower Your Healing: Part 2
Posted on by Andrew David Shiller, MD
Summary:
Science is revealing why chronic pain and associated problems happen. Understand this stuff and you’re on your way toward healing and feeling better. Chronic pain and illness don’t just happen. They are processes that develop over time. The body-mind learns chronic pain. And it learns the things that go along with chronic pain, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritable howel, high blood pressure, and so on. Just like your body-mind learns to be sick and suffering, you can unlearn sickness and suffering. You can learn to heal. If you want to feel better, then tune in to these videos and share them with others.Did You Know:
- Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
- You can learn more about Dr Shiller’s practice and schedule a telemedicine or in-person consultation at www.drshiller.com
- Movement Toward Health is an affordable and effective training program to teach you to heal and feel better and improve your functioning. It will teach you to integrate breathing techniques, mindfulness, and mindful movement techniques that are drawn from Dr Shiller’s 30+ years learning, practicing, and teaching these approaches to people suffering chronic pain and chronic illness. To get more info and be notified of the next start date CLICK HERE .
Related Posts:
- Don’t Miss These 3 Things That Can Prevent Healing from IBS, Fatigue, and Chronic Pain: Pt.1
- Life-Changing Stuff Doctors Don’t Tell You About Chronic Pain, Fibromyalgia, and Chronic Illness
- Heal Pain With Your Mind? What Does The Science Say?
Full Transcript:
Okay, so we have been talking about some of the basics of about why chronic pain and chronic illness are learning experiences, the physiologic, biological changes that happen from the interconnection of all your body systems that bring about the suffering, that bring about the dysfunction, that bring about the disability, and these are things that when you understand them, you can start to choose to unlearn them and to reverse them and start to actually install patterns of responsiveness to life in your mind/body system, in your biochemical metabolic nutritional system, and your movement system. So, let us continue. There are other aspects of neuroplasticity, right? So, like, you have protective responses in your body, you can actually say that the stress response is a protective response, because when that limbic system that says not safe to be, fires on, really what it is doing is making you vigilant so you can look out for further danger, and that is why so many people who have chronic stress, whether it is from some horrible trauma that develops PTSD or if it is just from living under chronic stress are a little bit hyped up, and they might be irritable emotionally, they might be just having a hard time sleeping, they might be developing digestive problems or cardiac problems, because their body is rehearsing a stress response, and that is a protective response. The person so to speak is looking to protect from danger. Meanwhile, the danger is over, but the system is stuck. Hope that makes sense. Similar things happen with your motor system, the nerves, muscles, joints, bones, the whole system that helps you move through space, move towards what you care about, and move away from what might be dangerous. If you put your hand in a hot stove, immediately you have a reflex that causes you to withdraw your hand, that reflex is plastic. If you have perpetual or persistent pain coming into a particular part of your body, those reflexes that create muscle contraction, tightening of connective tissue, shifting in joint position sense actually becomes set into the system. I told you about a woman who had some pain in her shoulder and after a while, two years, she was holding her arm like this, that is a protective withdrawal response. Maybe, I need to sit back a little bit so you can see that, but basically, she was walking around like this all the time, it is a protective withdrawal response, okay. Imagine you have got that in your hand and you are trying to reach out and type. Every day, you try to type and you are working against contraction, you are working against yourself. Same thing happens when someone is trying to walk. That is part of what perpetuates the problem, protective responses in your mind/body system, protective responses in your neuromuscular system, and the other aspect of it is changes that happen in your hormones, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, whether it is from chronic stress, chronic pain or whatever, that feeds into dysfunction in your gastrointestinal tract, and this is something that is showing up in all of the research of last 10 or 15 years or so, and that feeds into problems with the brain, because when the gastrointestinal tract gets dysfunctional, it creates a situation where there is biochemistry and immune changes that can feed into and worsen anxiety and depression, can feed into and worsen pain transmission. There is this intimate connection that is in every part of your body, it is a learning process, it is the way your body presumably is trying to protect itself, but it gets a bit haywire and becomes chronic pain and chronic illness, and it is a learning process through neural networks that are all talking to each other, nerves, organs immune system functioning in a system that gradually learns to become dysfunctional, and so what I am suggesting is that there are ways to make it less dysfunctional, and that is what healing is about, but it takes time and practice. I want to take it to the next step, right. We talked about neuroplasticity as one mechanism of that, how the connection and communication among nerves of various regions of the brain or various parts of the body, the spinal cord, the immune system, the gastrointestinal system, it is all neuroplastic and it all responds to persistence of distress of pain of noxious painful stimulus. There is another level of it, which is actually genetic, right? And we tend to think of, well, genes are just genes and what my genes say or what my body does, but what we know from the past few decades is that is not at all true, that we have genetic tendencies and that gene on your chromosome is surrounded by even greater amounts of material that is intelligent so to speak and it responds to your experience, it is called epigenetic material, and it determines whether your genes are turned on or turned off, and what we are knowing more and more and understanding with greater clarity is that if you are subject to persistent stress, persistent insomnia, persistent in pain, persistent emotional distress, it shifts gene expression, it is another aspect of the learning process, which can work against you or it can work for you. In summary, the processes by which chronic pain and chronic illness take place, they take place overtime, they are learning processes. There are neural networks, there are circuits that work together through various organs, various areas of your brain, nerves that fire together wire together. If you want to recover from chronic pain and chronic illness, what is really important is getting out of this mindset that someone else is going to come in and fix you, getting out of the mindset that someone has got some magic bullet that is going to change it all and realize that your habits, how you choose to think and work with your mind/body connection, what you choose to eat and how you nourish yourself biochemically, and what you do with your physical system can potentially retrain your brain, your body, your whole system to be more healthy, to recover a greater degree of function and health that gets taken away by that chronic process that generates chronic pain and chronic illness. The mindset shift is one of being proactive of realizing that you know what, you need to be in charge. You might have great healers that help you, you might have doctors that give you just the right medications or do just the right procedures, and I am not saying stop that stuff, but what I am saying that there is a piece about ownership and taking responsibility and learning, that is going to empower you, because you might go to a great therapeutic person, whatever they are, and you might see them once a week or once a month and they do something and something shifts. Maybe, it is psychotherapy, maybe it is hands-on therapy, but what are you doing in between, and so what I am suggesting to you is to start to learn what you can do for yourself, what you can do to teach your body and direct the learning process, so that your system moves towards recovery and healing. Okay, so, this is the first video. There is going to be another video that is going to get a bit more practical about it, and so stay tuned for that, and I hope you have enjoyed. In the meantime, feel free to leave comments, leave questions, and hopefully I can respond. Thanks so much.Join my email community and get notified about new content and transformative self-healing skills.
Why Does Chronic Pain Happen? These Scientific Principles Can Empower Your Healing: Part 1
Posted on by Andrew David Shiller, MD
Summary:
Science is revealing why chronic pain and associated problems happen. Understand this stuff and you’re on your way toward healing and feeling better. Chronic pain and illness don’t just happen. They are processes that develop over time. The body-mind learns chronic pain. And it learns the things that go along with chronic pain, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritable howel, high blood pressure, and so on. Just like your body-mind learns to be sick and suffering, you can unlearn sickness and suffering. You can learn to heal. If you want to feel better, then tune in to these videos and share them with others.Did You Know:
- Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
- Movement Toward Health is an affordable and effective training program to teach you to heal and feel better and improve your functioning. It will teach you to integrate breathing techniques, mindfulness, and mindful movement techniques that are drawn from Dr Shiller’s 30+ years learning, practicing, and teaching these approaches to people suffering chronic pain and chronic illness. To get more info and be notified of the next start date CLICK HERE.
- You can learn more about Dr Shiller’s practice and schedule a telemedicine or in-person consultation at www.drshiller.com
Related Posts:
- Don’t Miss These 3 Things That Can Prevent Healing from IBS, Fatigue, and Chronic Pain: Pt.1
- Life-Changing Stuff Doctors Don’t Tell You About Chronic Pain, Fibromyalgia, and Chronic Illness
- Heal Pain With Your Mind? What Does The Science Say?
Full Transcript:
All right, greetings everybody, Dr. Shiller here. So, there are some confusing beliefs in our culture that keep a lot of people sick and suffering and two of them are particularly difficult or toxic. One of them is that you might think somebody else is going to fix you, and the second one is that there could be some sort of quick fix where your chronic pain or chronic illness is going to go away like right away when you start doing whatever it is that you might start doing to help it, and I just want to share with you why that is not a good way to think, why it is counterproductive, and how it is the opposite of how things really work, because what that does is potentially invites you to open your mindset to think about things in a way that is more productive that actually might bring you some real solutions that could help you. The key thing is like this, chronic pain and chronic illness are learned, learned. Okay that might sound kind of strange because when you think of learned, you might think like, “Oh, I sat down and read a book, and I wanted to learn French or how to cook or whatever it is you might want to learn.” It is not what we are talking about here, but we are talking about a process over time, where the physiology, the biology of your body actually practices and reinforces and develops certain patterns, and that is how chronic pain happens, that is how chronic illness happens, and the key thing is learning how that happens, so you can learn how to unlearn it, and you can re-learn how to live well and actually to help your body heal. Let us talk about that. Let us talk about chronic pain for instance, like a lot of people who have chronic pain after some kind of trigger, there was an injury, maybe it was surgery, maybe it was an infection, maybe it was some kind of trauma or damage or a fall, and then what sometimes gradually happens is that the thing just gets worse over time, right? There can be worsening of pain in the actual region that got hurt and then there can be like a spreading of pain, so it might start in the person’s foot or hip and then it spreads to their back or whatever it is, goes to a different part of their body. Sometimes, it can affect the whole body. Sometimes, there can be issues with other organ systems that create secondary sources of pain, changes in the brain, the nerve, the muscle tissue. There can be things that drive chronic illness or even turn up pain sensitization, and that involves shifting in biochemistry of brain function, shifting in psychological function hormones, intestinal function, the balance of the immune system. These are all things that can worsen chronic pain, that can create secondary sources of pain and that can generate chronic illness. Let us try to understand how that happens. I just want to give an example of what I am talking about in case it is not clear yet. A woman I will call Jane. She was actually one of my first patients when I finished residency 20 years ago, and I learned so much from her and other people like her. She basically had fallen down. She was a teacher. She got knocked over by some students. She was trying to break up a fight, and she hit her head, she hit her shoulder, and she had what you described mild moderate injuries. She was not really messed up from it. She was not in the hospital, but gradually, she developed shoulder pain that spread all the way down her arm. She started developing headaches. She could not use her arm. She held her arm like someone who had had a stroke. She had headaches that were disabling. She developed all sorts of psychological challenges. She was in her mid-30s, and she was disabled. She was not working, and she had gone to many doctors, and all of them tried what I was taught to do when I was in medical school in residency; let us try this thing, let us try that thing, let us try this medication. The thing is we were not really looking at what was going on with her physiology, and so let us talk about what that is, what happens physiologically, and what I am going to share with you is kind of a digest of what I have learned from reading medical research and basic science research. A lot of this is stuff that is not in the clinic yet. It is well known that a lot of basic science research does not make it to clinical practice for 10, 20, 30 years, because it is a whole other thing to like understand what is going on than it is to develop like randomized controlled trials with lots and lots of people that convince most doctors so that things get into practice. The challenge is when someone comes to you who has got this chronic problem, who has tried all the first-line things that the best neurosurgeons and neurologists and orthopedic surgeons try, and then they are still suffering, what do you do then? And so that is kind of how I have built my practice. So what do you do then? And that is the kind of patient I have been seeing for 20 years. So, that is what I am speaking from, is that experience. Let us think about this underlying principle that we call neuroplasticity, and neuroplasticity means the brain, spinal cord, and nerves change over time. In response to experience, they change their function, they change their connectivity. Let us unpack that a little bit. Let us talk first of all just about the sensitivity of nerves to pain. So, you got a nerve in your finger and you get a bad injury on your finger and it burns or it hurts and that sends a signal up to your spinal cord, and from there, it goes up to your brain, and from the core of your brain where all the sensory and emotional and cognitive information is processed, it goes to the part of your brain that experiences pain. The nerve itself when it is persistently stimulated reorganizes, it changes DNA synthesis, it changes synthesis of proteins and ion channels and various kinds of sort of physiologic biological properties that affect how that nerve responds to stimulation and how it functions, and so you can get spreading of pain around the area of injury and you can get a situation where that nerve sends out signals that are wrong. That is the classic thing someone who has got nerve pain and you gently stroke the hand or something and it feels like fire and it burns or someone who has got neuropathy in their feet where they cannot stand the sheets, sitting on their toes at night. So, they cannot sleep, that is sensitization of the nerves, and that is a physiologic change that happens over time in that nerve. A similar thing happens in that whole tract going up to the part of your brain in the sensory cortex that says, how my hand hurts, because those interconnections, they are called synapses, right? So, one nerve talks to another nerve through a synapse. So, the signal comes down the nerve and it gets to this junction that is called the synapse, it is between the two nerves, and what happens is the signal gets down, and if it is strong enough, it causes that nerve to release some juice into the space between the nerves, and that juice is chemicals. It is neurotransmitter chemicals, and those contact that secondary nerve and stimulate the nerve to do various things. If they stimulate it in a strong enough way that secondary nerve fires, and those two nerves are in relationship with each other, and the more that this one fires and makes this fire, the more they get used to firing, that is why they like to quote, “Nerves that fire together wire together.” What that means is that the synapse as it gets more frequently active, as it is stimulated with a strong stimulus, it gets more active. So, they are kind of like good buddies talking to each other, they already know what the other guy is going to say, they are already in conversation, they remodel their connections. So, it becomes more sensitive. Now, the function of your entire brain, spinal cord, and body is built on thousands of nerves talking to each other. You have got regions of your brain that do certain properties, regions of your brain that do other functions, and the connectivity between all of those parts of your brain is what determines how well your brain or body works, and all of that is subject to this principle of neuroplasticity, where nerves that fire together wire together. So, suppose that somebody has a horrible traumatic accident and part of that is that they develop a painful thing happening in their tissue or their body, it is an injury, a wound, a break, whatever it is, it is painful. It is constantly sending a signal that is sensitizing. Meanwhile, they also had a traumatic experience, and that traumatic car accident or bomb going off, whatever it was, God forbid, creates a situation where they are in a stress response, they are in a danger response. Their system is stuck in that trauma, and that represents certain areas of the brain, often the limbic system, the frontal cortex that are interacting with each other and firing off this persistent pattern of “I am scared, it is not safe to be me.” All the information about your emotional reality is integrated with the information of your sensor reality, and so a traumatic experience that is practiced so to speak overtime, that becomes set into that person’s neurophysiology, habitually changes the pain transmission system, and that is probably, and it seems to be why we see it so often that people who have persistent or have had significant traumatic events often develop chronic pain, because the processing of pain and the processing of stress, a sense of danger, sense of lack of safety, grief, anger, frustration are intimately connected with each other. So, that is just kind of one example of how habitual experience of trauma stimulates habitual experience of pain, and it is a vicious cycle, and that is a learning process that gets worse overtime in many cases, and the issue is how to unlearn that. It gets richer and deeper though, okay. Okay, so we are going to take a break right now and cut this, and we will get to the continuation of this topic in the next video. Summing up, there is a foundation physiologically about why chronic pain and chronic illness are really learning processes and how you can, by understanding that, unlearn them, that is where we are going with this. The whole idea is for you to understand how the learning process may have happened in you, so that you can make positive choices to unlearn the negative stuff and install learning for the positive stuff and actually bring yourself towards healing. So, please look out for the next part of the video of the same name, and we will continue with the topic.Join my email community and get notified about new content and transformative self-healing skills.
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