How To Live With Chronic Pain

by Bob Walsh

Do you suffer from long-time pain? It is important that you find a way to manage your pain. Because if you don’t learn and apply pain management techniques effectively, you are much more likely to suffer from depression and are a great risk of reducing the quality of your overall life. Chronic pain is an awful thing, and it’s tough to manage – don’t burden yourself even more with depression or anxiety, but instead actively seek out a solution that works for you.

According to an article from the Wall Street Journal, overdoses from prescription painkillers is now one of the leading causes of accidental death in the USA, and the cost of pain treatments in medical bills and lost productivity amounts to more than $900 billion a year!

How to live with chronic pain? Click here!

There are many things that you can do to manage permanent pain. For example, meditation and breathing exercises. What makes these techniques work is largely the relaxing effect they have on your body. Muscle relaxation helps to ease the pain.

Another thing you can do is to exercise. When you exercise, your body produces natural endorphines. These are substances that not only boost your mood but also function as your body’s own pain killers.

Getting a wellness massage also helps many people to cope with chronic pain. The soothing quality of human touch and tactile interaction is something that most people instinctively understand.

You might also want to consider joining a support group. This will enable you to share your experiences and feelings with others who go through the same thing, and hear their stories too. Many people say that this has helped them to better cope with pain.

How to live with chronic pain? Click here!

Try to reduce stress in your life. Studies have shown that stress – both emotional or physical – can increase your body’s sensitivity to pain and makes you more vulnerable overall. Whatever your life circumstances, if you can reduce the amount of stress which you experience on a daily basis, that can help you to better cope with pain.

Biofeedback can also be a good way to learn to handle your body’s signals more powerfully. Essentially what you do is you learn to consciously control body functions that have previously been controlled by your subconscious mind. This has been done by yogis for thousands of years – but scientific methods have stripped the mysticism away from these techniques and can now easily be applied and learned by everyone, despite of their religious or spiritual beliefs.

Hypnosis is a highly effective method that can show you a better way for how to live with chronic pain. It combines several advantages of different methods. It’s naturally relaxing and it directly utilizes the powers of your subconscious mind. There are many examples of people who suffered from pain – both acute and chronic – who were able to naturally control it with the help of hypnotic suggestions. You can either seek the help of a professional certified hypnotist or use hypnosis recordings that you can listen to whenever you feel the pain intensifying. If you don’t work with a hypnotherapist yet, my suggestion is that you make use of hypnosis recordings first – they are much cheaper and for many people they are all that’s required.

How to live with chronic pain? Click here!

A recent study1 has demonstrated the power your state of mind has over pain perception.

Researchers found out that chronic-pain patients experience higher levels of pain after negative media exposure. That means, chronic pain patients who watched TV news, listened to radio news or read articles about recent missile attacks on their region (which makes for negative news) reported elevated levels of physical pain.

The scientists found out that it’s not actually whether or not a region gets attacked, but how much media coverage about these attacks a patient consumes that determines whether they’ll experience more pain in the coming weeks or not.

Interestingly this effect was strictly limited to physical pain. Emotional pain (like depression or grief) was not influenced by the amount of negative media reports a patient consumed.

 Cope with chronic pain? Click here!

  1. Does War Hurt? Effects of Media Exposure After Missile Attacks on Chronic PainSheera F. Lerman, Zvia Rudich und Golan ShaharJournal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings, Online Firstâ„¢, 15 Juni 2012 []