News: December 2024

I Didn't Do Anything! Why Does it Hurt? ... You Need a Bigger Glass!

Imagine you have a tall glass. Inside your glass goes all of your stress from everyday life: work, family, environment, demands, sleep deprivation, political news, etc. How much of your glass is full? For many, life stress fills up about 40-50%, leaving a 50-60% threshold, or window of tolerance, for new stressors that might come your way. But if we have chronic pain, that alone can easily fill the glass another 30%, leaving us with a 10-20% window of tolerance. That's not a lot of space! Something as common as running late for work, catching a cold, or getting into an argument can fill our glass beyond capacity, and that is when the "alarm" goes off.

Our bodies respond biochemically in an effort to protect us. We become hypersensitive to stimuli, including pain, which causes us to be emotionally and cognitively hypervigilant. We are on high alert and even perceive threats when none actually exist. For example, we experience pain even in the absence of active tissue damage. This is a cycle that causes that alarm to continue blare, and leads to depression, burnout, and yes, even more pain. (I hear a lot of clients refer to this as a flare-up.) This is also when we start to feel pain from old injuries we haven't felt in a long time, or perhaps even forgot about. "I haven't done anything physically to cause the flare-up," we think, "so what gives?"

Since we don't realize why we have pain (our glasses have overflowed) we're not sure what to do about it, so we end up either trying to ignore it or numb it with painkillers. Over time and with repetition, ignoring or numbing pain diminishes our window of tolerance. In other words, the size of the glass shrinks. It then takes a decreased amount of stimulus to sound the alarm. Without meaning to, we are learning to be in more pain.

The good news is, we can also learn to reduce pain and eventually become pain-free. This also takes time and repetition, but is well worth the effort. There's not much we can do to empty our glass, since much of it is filled with external factors beyond our control, but we can make the glass bigger, thereby increasing our window of tolerance.

The best way to begin is by journaling your pain every day. Note when you feel pain, the location, duration, intensity, what you're doing at the time, what you were doing right beforehand, etc. Also note the times you don't have pain. Just increasing your awareness can reduce the severity of your pain. Journaling also encourages you to differentiate between painful and non-painful behavior and focus on positive changes. The body's perception and prediction of pain begins to alter and, over time, we rewire pathways in the brain to allow for new predictive, symptom free behavior.

For example, say your knee pain begins after running for 15 minutes. (You know this because you've been journaling.) You begin running for 14 minutes, stopping before the onset of pain. Without the reinforcement of pain every time you run, your brain learns that it no longer needs to associate pain with running, and slowly you're able to increase your pain-free running time.

I've begun telling all of my chronic pain clients to keep a pain journal and I recommend you do the same. Even better, let's work together so I can guide you through the process, either with in-person massage therapy sessions, or virtual sessions if you don't live in or near NYC. So grab a journal and start learning to be pain-free!

Source: Troy Lavigne - Neuroscience of Massage Therapy class

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Breathing Exercises for Anxiety

Breathing is not something we generally think about. It happens automatically and unconsciously. And thank goodness! But the way we breathe has a direct influence on our health and wellbeing. And these days, most of us could use a reassessment.

Chronic stress promotes rapid, shallow breathing. This leads to oxidative stress, which causes cell and tissue damage, inflammation, and disease. Sometimes we even hold our breaths without realizing it! The erratic, inefficient use of oxygen creates incoherence throughout bodily functions, resulting in even more anxiety, a lack of energy, depression, and any number of chronic physical, mental, and psychological illnesses.

We can't control the outside world, but the good news is that we do have control of our internal environment. We have the power to change our physiology, downregulate the nervous system, manage our heart rate and blood pressure, increase our energy, attain mental clarity, improve digestion, and transform how we feel and show up in the world. We can learn to control our breathing.

Follow along as I teach you calming and effective breathing techniques to start you on the road towards better physical, mental, and emotional health!

What's new with me ...

A huge thank you to all my subscribers for your continued interest and support! I hope you find these monthly wellness newsletters insightful, inspiring, and practical. As I continue to learn, practice, and grow in the field of massage therapy (over 16 years!) I will always do my best to share my knowledge, informed by the latest research, advanced education, and clinical experience - in addition to all that I learn from my clients every day!

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Wishing you all a new year filled with love, joy, and peace.