Stress and Chronic Pain Part 1 of 2
By: Seraphim Heifetz
Tags: Medical, Medicine, Pain, Chronic Pain

Providers who specialize in chronic pain rehabilitation always evaluate the patient’s pain, of course, but they also always assess the stressful problems that the patient experiences. To the list above, we might add such stressors as depression, anxiety, past trauma, sleep problems, persistent problems with concentration and short-term memory, financial problems, loss of the role in your occupation or family, the loss of sexual and emotional intimacy in your relationship, and the list could go on. All these problems cause stress, which is why we call them stressors.

Why is it important to deal with stressors when having chronic pain?

There are a number of reasons why it is important, but let’s review two today:

If you can’t fix the pain, you might as well work on reducing the problems that occur because of the pain.

To successfully self-manage chronic pain, you have to manage your stress.

Let’s look at these reasons one at a time.

Stress caused by pain

Understandably, patients with chronic pain want to focus on how to reduce pain. To some extent, this focus is helpful. There are indeed a number of lifestyle changes, such as mild aerobic exercise and regular relaxation exercises, which, when done over time, can reduce pain. There are some medications, such as tricyclic antidepressants and antiepileptics, which have been shown to reduce pain also. However, these treatments are only so effective. We really don’t have any treatments that are super effective for chronic pain. (Procedures, such as injection therapies and spine surgeries, are known to be largely ineffective, despite how often they are pursued.) At the end of the day, chronic pain is chronic. It’s not ultimately fixable. While some of things that can be done to reduce chronic pain are helpful, they are only mildly so.

Given this fact, if you can’t fix the pain, then you might as well work on the problems that occur as a result of the pain. It’s possible to have chronic pain and not have it disrupt your life. It’s possible to have chronic pain and not be depressed about it. It’s possible to have chronic pain and sleep well at night. It’s possible to have chronic pain and work full-time. It’s possible to have chronic pain and have a fulfilling and intimate relationship.

Now, many people have to learn how. But, if they are open to learning, they can learn to self-manage pain well enough to be able to overcome these secondary problems. Such learning can take time and practice. It also takes a certain amount of devotion to maintain lifestyle changes, once you learn how to do them. Nonetheless, it is possible.

What patients learn could be called stress management and it involves cognitive behavioral therapies.

Good self-management of chronic pain involves stress management. When you overcome depression, even if chronic pain remains, it’s still a win for you. When you come to sleep well at night, after a period of chronic insomnia, life gets better, even if you continue to have chronic pain. When the strain in your relationships subside, your marriage and family life deepen, making life more meaningful and fulfilling, despite having chronic pain.

Overcoming the stressors in life, even when they occur as a result of chronic pain, is a way to get better when there is no cure for the pain itself. Patients with chronic pain might initially wonder why chronic pain rehabilitation providers want to focus on the stressors in their life, but from here we can see why. It’s a way to get better when there is no cure. If you can’t fix the pain, focus on overcoming the stressful consequences of living with pain. By doing so, you make life easier and better.

You also make the chronic pain more tolerable by coping better with it. By overcoming your depression or anxiety, everything in life gets easier to deal with — pain included. It becomes more tolerable. When you sleep reasonably well, on most nights, you deal with everything better — pain included. It becomes more tolerable. The same is true with any of the stressful problems that go along with living with chronic pain. When you overcome them, you cope better with the pain itself. By focusing on reducing stress, you come to cope better and pain can go from what was once intolerable to what is now tolerable.

Chronic pain rehabilitation is the form of chronic pain management that most focuses on helping patients to overcome the stress of living with chronic pain and thereby cope better with pain. The other forms of chronic pain management — spine surgery clinics, interventional pain management clinics, medication management clinics — focus mostly on reducing pain, and not on the stressors that occur as a result of pain. Chronic pain rehabilitation programs focus on both. They provide empirically proven methods to reduce pain, while also providing therapies to overcome depression, anxiety, insomnia, cognitive deficits, relationship problems, and disability.

For more info on how to take control of your health, and tackle chronic pain in a smart way, please reach out to:

Phone: (416) 477–1101

E-mail: reception@priclinic.com

Web: www.priclinic.com