What effect can pain have on your mental health?

10 October 2021

Willow Chiropractic pain and mental health

Pain can affect your mental health in more ways than you might realise.

When you can’t do the things you love and enjoy, it can be frustrating, and not being able to do the simple things, like tying your shoes, can be terrifying. It can leave you feeling trapped, like there’s no hope, and that nothing will ever help.

All of your energy gets channelled into finding a way to cope with the pain; it’s all you can think about. 

There is scientific evidence to support the idea that persistent pain can negatively affect your cognitive ability because of the way it triggers changes in your brain’s systems. Pain is a survival signal for the brain. This triggers your body’s fight or flight response, which changes the brain physically and chemically. If the pain was temporary, all these changes that happen would go back to normal, but this is different if the pain is chronic.

If the pain persists, the changes that have happened in the brain last for longer, which, over time, leads to real psychological changes. This can affect your brain’s function and trigger changes in your behaviour over time. 

The natural response of your body is to try and escape the pain, hence the fight or flight response, but with chronic pain this isn’t possible. This might cause feelings of anxiety. Even when the pain might not be there, you might feel anxious about if the pain is going to come back. You might even start to restrict your movements and what you do in your daily life to limit the chance of the pain returning.

Your body is incredibly intelligent. It will always find a way to let you know when it needs that extra support. That’s what it’s doing when you experience pain. Being in pain isn’t what any of us want, but it’s the last sign that our body gives us to tell us something isn’t right.

Chiropractic is a great way of providing your body with the support it needs to start to heal and restore itself. It removes the interference and blockages in your spine to make sure your body can function as highly as possible, which also helps it to deal with stresses of everyday life.

We treat all our patients like we treat our loved ones; we don’t just want to get them to a point where their pain might come back. We want to take them that one step further where they’re moving towards wellness, and they are confident in their bodies and health.

You don’t need to feel like you’re alone in this.

We are dedicated to helping people like you to get out of pain, and to keep you out of pain in the future so that you can lead a healthier, fuller life. Chiropractic care has been proven to help with different types of pain, but it can do so much more for your health.

You sometimes don’t realise how long you’ve been dealing with pain and tension, and how much this affects your mental health. A lot of people think that niggles, aches and pains are normal as you get older, but that’s not the case. Click here to read more about why aches and pains aren’t inevitable as you get older.

You are healthy when you are thinking well, eating well, and moving well. If you’re not in pain, then you dedicate less energy to managing your pain, so you can move better and focus on other things that you enjoy. This then means you’ll start to think more positively and are more inclined to make healthier lifestyle choices.

Your body can also dedicate more dedication to other functions and processes without you even knowing, which means you might even see improvements in other areas that you might not have expected. It could be that you notice that you can do something again that you didn’t realise you couldn’t do before, like bending over to tie your shoe laces rather than resting your foot on something to be able to tie your laces.

This will take time.

Chiropractic isn’t a quick fix, and neither is anything else. When you have pain, in particular severe pain, it has taken a long time to get to that point. It doesn’t happen overnight, even if sometimes it might seem like it. 

Your pain might have you feeling trapped right now, or you might not be seeing the progress you were hoping for with your chiropractic journey yet, but you won’t be in this position forever.

Not everyone’s healing journey is the same, there might be bumps in the road. Be open minded, be patient, and most importantly, don’t lose hope. Click here to book your consultation with one of our expert Chiropractors.

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