Pain management
Pain serves many functions, but its most basic is to alert you, your consciousness, that something is wrong and a response is required. The response may be simple and reflexive (take your hand out of the fire), or even unconscious (causing your glands to secrete hormones to counteract the situation). Adrenaline may be released. Your body may tense up. Inadvertent and complex results may and do occur as the result of physical pain. But the thing you need to remember is: pain is there to help you. It warns you when something is wrong, makes sure you know to protect yourself. It is a valuable evolutionary tool.
Anxiety goes hand in hand with chronic pain; those experiencing long-term health problems are significantly more likely to suffer from chronic anxiety and depression because of the heightened strain their bodies and minds are under. And, as being in pain can cause anxiety, anxiety can exacerbate or even initiate pain. Anxiety can also lower your tolerance for pain.
As two sides of the same coin, a significant part of pain management comes from identifying, understanding, and moving past feelings of anxiousness. It can be unemotionally observed, understood, and ameliorated. Knowing what’s making you anxious is half the battle in overcoming it, as when you identify the fundamental fears driving your emotions, you can begin to rationally evaluate them. Is this a realistic fear? Is there evidence for this feeling, or am I basing my anxiety solely on my own perceptions?
There is an old Buddhist quote: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.” Pain of any kind is unavoidable in life, but a significant aspect of the effect it has on us comes not from the pain itself, but from our interpretation of the pain, the way we deal with it. Pain is an experience; suffering is the reaction to that experience—an emotional reaction we can control versus the physical reality of the pain we cannot.
Mindfulness and Meditation are ways to address issues of pain without medication. These are simple practices that can be taught and integrated into daily life.
Exercises To Calm Your Anxious Thoughts
Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you.
9 Ways to Calm Your Anxious Mind
Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you. Anxiety can also lead to overthinking, which makes you more anxious, which leads to more overthinking, and so on. How can you get out of this vicious cycle? Repressing anxious thoughts won’t work; they will just pop up again, sometimes with more intensity. But there are more effective techniques you can borrow from mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive-behavioral therapies.
The following are 9 strategies to help you get unstuck and move forward:
1. Attempt Cognitive Distancing
Try to see your anxious thoughts as guesses, not as facts. Your mind is trying to protect you by predicting what could happen—but just because something could happen doesn’t mean it will. Look at objective evidence: How likely is it that the negative outcome will actually happen? Is there anything good that might happen instead? And which do you think is most likely to happen, based on past experience and other information you have about the situation?
2. Try Cognitive De-Fusion
Stop being fused with your thoughts. Think of your thoughts as moving data passing through your mind, rather than the objective truth about a situation.Our brains are hypersensitive to threat and danger because this kept our ancestors alive in the wild. Some of your thoughts may just be automatic conditioned reactions generated by a brain that is oriented to survival. Choose whether or not to believe these thoughts, rather than just accepting them.
3. Practice Mindfulness
Practice observing your thoughts, rather than reacting automatically to them. Think of your thoughts as clouds floating by. Which draw you in and which make you want to run away? Is there a way you can untangle yourself and just observe your thoughts, rather than reacting?
4. Focus on Direct Experience
Your mind makes up stories about who you are, and about your safety and lovability. Not all of these stories are accurate. Sometimes our minds are biased by negative past experiences. What is your experience in the present moment? Is this something that is actually happening or something that might happen? Notice that they are not the same thing, even though your mind may treat them as the same.
5. Label Things
Label the type of thought you are having, rather than paying attention to its content. Watch your thoughts and when you notice a judgment (e.g., how good or bad the situation is), go ahead and label it as Judging. If you notice a worry (e.g., that you are going to fail or experience a loss) label it as Worrying. If you are criticizing yourself, label it as Criticizing. This gets you away from the literal content of your thoughts and gives you more awareness of your mental processes. Do you want to be spending your time judging and worrying? Are there less judgmental or worried ways to see the situation?
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6. Stay in the Present
Is your mind regurgitating the past? Just because something negative happened in the past doesn’t mean it has to happen today. Ask yourself if the circumstances, or your knowledge and coping abilities, have changed since the last time. As an adult, you have more choice about whom to associate with and more ability to identify, preempt, or leave a bad situation than when you were a child or teenager.
7. Broaden Your View
Are you focusing too narrowly on the threatening aspects of a situation, rather than seeing the whole picture? Anxiety makes our minds contract and focus on the immediate threat without considering the broader context. Is this situation really as important as your anxiety says it is? Will you still care about this problem in 5 or 10 years? If not, then ease up on the worry.
8. Get Up and Get Going
Worrying over an issue without creating a solution will not help you solve the problem. It may, in fact, make you less likely to act by feeding your anxiety. When your mind is stuck in a loop, you can interrupt it by getting up and moving around or doing a different task or activity. When you sit back down, you should have a different perspective.
9. Decide Whether a Thought Is Helpful
Just because a thought is true doesn't mean that it is helpful to focus on—at least not all the time. If only 1 in 10 people will get the job you seek, and you keep thinking about those odds, you may become demotivated and not even bother applying. This is an example of a thought that is true but not helpful. Focus your attention on what is helpful and let the rest go!
Sharing problems
SHARING PROBLEMS
The next time you’re struggling with something , you can remember that you’re not alone. It helps me a lot to know that I’m not alone with anything in life. The worst part about struggling and being frustrated is feeling like you’re alone and no one understands. There’s no one that can help you. You’re stuck in a place with this problem no one can solve and no idea what to do.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in a place like that. The entry way to having it be better starts with knowing that you’re not alone. Once I realized I’m not alone with my problems I prayed for help. Then I realized there were places I could go where I could talk to people with problems exactly like mine. I could talk to them about their problems and they could talk to me and we could all help each other.
They say a problem shared is a problem halved. When you share your problem with someone and they share theirs with you, then both problems seem easier. For me it helps to hear what other people are dealing with. I can see I’m not in this place all alone where I’m frustrated and struggling. Everyone all the time has things that they’re struggling with.
If you told me everything you’re dealing with, there’s 1000+ other people who are dealing with similar things. If you all sat together and explained your problems, I couldn’t distinguish between any of you. It’s amazing when you look at the world from your point of view. From my point of view, I see a lot of people dealing with the same kinds of problems.
When it’s my problem and my point of view, then it seems like this is a unique problem given to me and only I am dealing with this. I feel like only I’ve got this problem and I’m all alone with this problem. When I hear other people share what they’re struggling with, it kind of all sounds the same. That helps me to recognize the same thing in myself. This has been a week that’s more challenging than all the weeks I’ve had this year. There’s been a lot of crying, prayer, more anger than usual, directed at myself. There’s been less forgiveness than usual.
Still, it’s been much better than it has been most of my life because I know I’m not alone in dealing with my problems. I don’t struggle alone. In fact, I taking care of myself as much as possible because I am being reflected in everyone around me. If I’m struggling and having a problem, that becomes everyone else’s problem around me.
When I’m having a hard time and beating up on myself, it makes it easier for people going through the same thing. That way, the work I do in here on the inside is influential to the entire world. It is for everyone. The work that we do to be in the best place we can be influences all of us.
It seems like sometimes the collective human conscious puts down certain things on us to deal with. It seems like that when there seems to be weeks where more people than usual are struggling. That’s when it helps to see that you’re not alone. It helps for me to see other people’s problems. A couple of weeks ago there were a lot of other people struggling and I felt pretty good. I realized that sometimes everyone just gets dealt a tough hand that day or that week and it’s okay. It’s nothing personal. When it’s not personal, there’s not this story with it that’s so hard to get passed. It’s something impersonal that can get dropped like a hand in poker. You get dealt a hand and if you don’t like that hand, you fold it and take another one.
I try to ask, when I see that I’m miserable and struggling, I pray for another hand, like another hand in poker. I pray for a new attitude. I see that I’ve been dealt a bad attitude at that moment and I pray for a new one. I pray to do the things right that I know are important. I pray to take care of myself and be a good husband, father, family member, friend, and teacher.
that helps me focus on what I’m doing around me instead of what I was doing before or what I will be doing in the future.
I hope what I’ve shared with you is that if you’re struggling with something you’re not alone. As many people have said about all the ideas I make, I have a hard time, too. My hard times hurt a lot when they come.
The only miracle in it is that I can get through things and minimize the damage that is done both inside and around me. Most of my life, I threw a temper tantrum and everyone around me had to or I would pay attention. I would just get worse until they did.
Today, it’s an honour to suffer myself and get through it without having everyone be dragged in with me. I don’t have to drag them all the way down with me.
Today I pray to remember I’m not alone when I need to know that in a moment of struggle, frustration, or challenge. I pray to remember how grateful I am to know I’m not alone so many times and it’s helped me to get through things faster. It’s helped me face the things I’m struggling with and to share them with other people. I’m thankful for so much relief for so many of the things in my life. I pray that you have the same chance today. You can see you’re not alone with what you’re struggling with. You can ask for help knowing you’re not alone. You can know how to get through what you’re dealing with today, tomorrow or whenever it comes to you. Thank you for reading this. I hope you have a great day.
A helpful video:
https://youtu.be/lT9lw-Y_HuU- Youtube video