05 Apr This Is How To Deal With Pain: 4 Powerful Secrets From Research
Pain is an inevitable and unavoidable part of life.
The Buddhists have know this for thousands of years; and in fact, anyone that stops and things for even just a minute or so will also come to this realisation.
What this means is that happiness isn’t a life without pain, but a life in which one effectively and mindfully deals with pain.
And that’s possible, happiness is possible, with this 4 great suggestions from Eric Barker …
There’s a case in the medical literature of a butcher who slipped while working and got his arm caught on a meat hook. Yeah, ouch. The pain was bright, attention-grabbing, impressive, and very good at what it does – it was the Beyoncé of pain. He was in agony.
Then he realized the hook only caught his sleeve. Didn’t even penetrate the skin. And the pain went away. Weird, right?
Here’s another one — and at the risk of sounding less Eric Barker and more Clive Barker, I’ll warn you it’s a bit darker…
When you read the testimony of political dissidents who have been tortured, they describe a consistent pattern: before the process began, they were made to stare at the implements that would be used to harm them.
A cruel but effective method of intimidation. But it was also effective at increasing the subsequent pain they felt. Huh?
In my first book I discussed people with a gene variant that confers the ability to never feel pain. (Might sound great but, trust me, it’s not good.) And in my second book I talked about the mind-bending nature of the placebo effect. (Placebos even work if you know they’re placebos.) Pain is emotionally terrifying but intellectually, uh, kinda fascinating. Pain is a mystery.
20.4% of American adults deal with chronic pain. And we’ve all dealt with acute pain. When you’re the one feeling it, it’s not quite as interesting. You suddenly find yourself in another dimension. The innocuous elements of life rub up against the horrific. Makes H.P. Lovecraft seem like Barney the dinosaur. Oscar Wilde once quipped, “God spare me physical pain and I’ll take care of the moral pain myself.”
Time to get to the bottom of this and learn what we can do about it. Whether you’re dealing with chronic pain, injury, illness, or recurring issues like migraines, there are insights from the science we can use to reduce suffering. And if you’re helping someone with pain, there are insights here you might want to pass along.
This is medical territory which means we need to be on our best epistemic behavior. Caveat emptor, YMMV, for informational purposes only, etc. This is information you want to discuss with your doctor. When it comes to anything serious, never accept without question anything you read from “some guy on the internet” and as much research as I look at, I’m not a doctor. I’m still “some guy on the internet.”
We’re going to draw from a wide range of sources including “The Pain Management Workbook”, “When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery”, “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World”, and “The Psychology of Pain.”
Okay, let’s limp to it…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE