Persistent or chronic pain is very difficult to live with. All pain is real pain and we often want this pain to be fixed as quickly as possible. The challenge with most types of persistent pain is that they are influenced by many different factors and we have to look at areas where we can improve in our daily lives, to get gradual progressive improvements, eventually conquering, or at least improving persistent or chronic pain.
Breath is more important for pain that I would have thought early in my career. Early in my clinical education, I learned about the neurophysiology of the autonomic nervous system. This is the system that controls the things that we don't control (at least not directly). This includes things like blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and a lot of our postural muscle tone (the tension in our muscles when we are not actively moving). When we are in a state of fear (often called fight or flight), feeling angry, or worried, we often breathe quickly, this often leads to tighter muscles, and a heightened sensitivity to pain. Slowing down our breathing has been shown to reduce our sensitivity to pain. Something as simple as breathing in for 2 seconds, and breathing out for 8 seconds has been shown to help. These reasons, and likely others, are why breath (especially breathing rate) is something to consider and work on when experiencing any type of persistent pain.
Breathing is something that can influence our autonomic nervous system. Our posture is also something that may have an influence on our nervous system. Studies have found that our posture, mood and vagal tone (activity of the autonomic nervous system) influence one another. Slouched, stooped and tense postures are often associated with worse mood and vagal tone. Working to improve our posture has been shown to help this. This does not mean that your posture has to be perfect every second of the day. It does mean that doing some simple exercises to improve the endurance and awareness of postural muscles can improve mood, vagal tone, and pain (neck pain, headaches, jaw pain, back pain and others).
Exercise for better postural endurance and awareness can help us to feel better when dealing with pain, but all types of movement should be considered when experiencing persistent pain. Pain can make exercise difficult and often makes it impossible to exercise the way we might want to or the way we did before we had pain. For this reason, movement and pain make exercise difficult or impossible. For best results in recovery, it is critical to engage in some form of regular movement practice. This will sometimes be exercises given by a healthcare provider, like me, or it can be as simple as going for multiple 5 minute walks per day. There are many challenges that we face when dealing with persistent pain. It is essential that we move regularly, we should also try to do movements that we enjoy and can improve with regular engagement.
If you need some help working on a changing these things, contact us at 613-852-7769 or info@lowertownrehabilitation.ca
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