Chronic pain is the recurring pain that continues even after the instigating illness or injury has healed. The residual pain signals continue to trigger the nervous system for years. People who deal with chronic pain prioritize medications and machine-driven treatments. These therapies significantly lessen or eliminate the pain instantly and allow the patients to continue their routine lives. In other words, injections, surgery, and medications provide tangible outcomes for pain-alleviation, so they are the preferred choice of patients. Additionally, research reveals that most chronic pain patients suffer from anxiety and depression, which intensify the pain and increase the incidence of flare-ups. Yet, the mental aspect of dealing with chronic pain mostly goes untreated.
Coping efficiently with chronic pain will have an incredible impact on your emotional and mental well-being. Most patients and even clinics prioritize curing the physical symptoms and ignore the critical cognitive factors involved in pain management. Consequently, around 70-90% of chronic pain patients have poor coping mechanisms. Expert psychiatric support can also help reduce these statistics dramatically.
The following techniques for chronic pain management can help you deal with your pain more proficiently, increase the impact of any physical treatments, and help you cope emotionally and mentally to achieve a complete state of health and well-being eventually.
Seek Help Because You Are Not Alone
Professional medical treatment will help you solve complex problems and alter behavioral patterns that aggravate your symptoms. A pain management nurse practitioner is a registered expert in helping patients cope with acute and chronic pain. Nurses enroll in RN to BSN degree programs to receive such training and provide proper medication to relieve pain without pushing their patients into critical situations. These nurses ensure medication is administered on time to prevent any issues.
Over 90% of the patients with chronic pain fit in clinical anxiety and depression diagnoses yet stay untreated. These patients aren’t seeing any licensed psychiatrist for professional help to process and deal with their thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Every patient with chronic pain needs to get the timely support required to stay as healthy as possible throughout their lives.
Identify Your Triggers
Suffering from chronic pain inevitably means that some days can be much better than others, even if you follow a proper treatment plan.
Flare-ups can be triggered through factors completely out of your control, such as a bone-chilling wind or disaster. To effectively understand how to cope with your chronic pain, you need to recognize your physical and emotional triggers. For example, if you’re susceptible to anxiety or certain events or people stress you, such emotions will increase unfavorable flare-ups. However, raising awareness and understanding of controlling your emotional triggers will help control pain levels.
On the other hand, physical restrictions and mechanical stress can also trigger chronic pain. For instance, in the case of backaches, if you were very active and used to heavy lifting, you may feel you can still do it. However, if you suddenly decide to move your piano, you can potentially trigger an old strain or injure your back further, intensifying the pain. Setting your physical boundaries and limitations ensures that you don’t activate pain triggers. It is particularly crucial for individuals who push their bodies to comprehensive limits.
Find Techniques You Love to Relax
Stress, depression, and anxiety increase chronic pain levels since such emotions result in a cascade of chemicals and hormones that increase inflammation and muscle tension.
Chronic stress is considered a secret killer for all. However, patients with chronic pain are at high risk, which indicates they should consistently use stress management therapies. The patients who do so can help control their pain levels and increase the threshold for enduring pressure.
Most doctors talking to their patients ask a series of different questions, including:
- What relaxes them the most?
- What makes them peaceful?
- What would they do if they could be doing something right now?
Ask yourself these same questions to draw on things that help lessen stress and anxiety when your pain feels out of control.
While relaxation and stress management are extremely personal, there’re proven techniques that doctors highly recommend incorporating, such as deep breathing and meditation. These practices are scientifically proven to naturally start the body’s relaxation mechanisms and shut down the stress response. It enables you to go back to a calm state and inhibits further damage from stress’s mental and physical effects.
Trust a Support Group
Living a life with chronic pain can become incredibly isolating at times. A support group can help you by offering connection, understanding, and compassion throughout your journey. Engaging with a community of compatible and like-minded people, you can vent your frustrations and eliminate tensions that you have been naturally holding in for a long time.
In a trusted support group, you will find a space where everyone can genuinely relate to your life experiences and completely understand them. A support group helps you cope with challenging emotions while discovering potential pain-relieving mechanisms and treatments that can help you long-term.
Practice Acceptance
Dealing with pain is an individual and personal effort. Unfortunately, people who suffer from chronic pain may not live like everyone else. To cope and function effectively, you need to adapt to and accept your triggers. Pain acceptance will help reduce psychological stress and cognitive dissonance, which enhances mental wellness and physical function in various cases.
Acceptance helps one realize that it’s pivotal to give more time to yourself with the love, respect, and self-care you deserve.
For you, it can come in various forms, such as honoring the idea of taking a break, remaining gentle with yourself, or slowing down the pace of activities you need to perform. You can also spend more time in yoga, meditation, massages, baths, family, and friends to help you lessen pain intensity and improve your overall quality of life.
Conclusion
Chronic pain is considered a multi-faceted ailment that demands a multi-faceted treatment or plan for care. From experience, you may know that cognitive therapy seems a helpful and underleveraged pain management mechanism that greatly lowers the suffering you feel. Other than that, several techniques provide you with the strength to manage your chronic pain more effectively. Moreover, getting professional help can also help you in pain management and treat the emotional and mental side effects of your chronic pain. A support group can also prove beneficial for chronic pain patients as everyone there can relate to their problems and collectively find solutions to cope with them.
