Change Your Response to Pain to Recover from Back Pain

A previous post described how someone can find themself in a cycle of pain that can continue to pull them into a downward spiral of chronic back pain. The increased pain experiences leads to feeling validated in the belief that there is something seriously wrong. This leads to more stress, then more muscle tension, negative feelings and thoughts, more pain, and so on.

This can be a difficult cycle to break out of. However, the first step is to understand and acknowledge what is happening. It is also important to realize that there is an alternative approach.

This second option is to reverse direction and transition into a cycle of recovery.

Most Back Pain is Muscular

The first step in shifting to a cycle of recovery is understanding that 99.5% of chronic back pain is muscular in nature and there is no definitive correlation between many back diagnoses and pain. For example, a recent study found that 64% of people without chronic back pain showed abnormal findings on MRI. The reverse has also been shown, with people in pain showing no abnormal findings.

Second, there is not a clear correlation between back surgery to repair abnormalities and relief from pain. In one study, half of the people who went through exploratory spinal surgery (this was before MRIs) and were then merely stitched up because no abnormalities were found reported relief from their pain. Thinking that you are better can lead to feeling better!

Numerous other studies report "successful" surgical correction of an abnormality with little or no relief of pain.The underlying reason for these results appears to be that most (99.5%) back pain is muscular in nature. Muscular pain due to tightness does not show up on an MRI and is not corrected by spinal surgery.

So, if 199 out of 200 people with chronic back pain are really suffering from muscular tightness, and if being in a cycle of pain is perpetuating back pain, what is the alternative?

Choosing a Cycle of Recovery

The answer appears to lie in shifting towards a cycle of recovery. This patterning begins with an understanding of the nature of most back pain, as described above. It is also important to understand that the pain is due to muscle tightness, and that there are three principal causes for this tightness.

It is by addressing these three contributing factors that relief can be achieved.

Another important concept to understand is that protecting our backs is, well, not protecting our backs. In fact, the opposite is true - "protecting" our backs leads to muscle tightness, which actually contributes to the pain.

Where to Start

To have healthy, relaxed muscles, we need to move regularly. Begin by taking a long, deep breath, try to let go of any tension - from your head to your toes - and start moving. Start where you are, possibly something as simple as enjoying a walk. Walk outside if the weather permits, as outside walks further help by releasing pain-killing endorphins in the brain.

Another approach is to list all of the things that you've stopped doing, then list how difficult it is for you to do each one (easy/moderate/difficult) and how much pleasure you get from the activity (none/some/a lot). Start with something that is easy to do that you get a lot of pleasure from.

What you will notice is that your muscles will start to loosen up and function in a normal way, you'll do something that you previously kept yourself from doing, and you will receive positive feedback that your back is not, in fact, "damaged" as you may have previously thought.