What is Chronic Pain?
What is pain and why do we have it?
At a very basic level, pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is interpreted in our brains. Pain is your body's warning system and tells you when there is a threat to your safety—therefore it is unpleasant on purpose.
Imagine placing your hand on a hot stove. The nerve endings on your hand notice the change in temperature and send signals through the spinal cord and into the brain. The brain interprets the heat sensation as pain and sounds a pain alarm back down the spinal cord and to the nerves in your hand. This causes you to quickly pull your hand away from the hot stove to keep from burning yourself. In this sense, pain is a good thing and keeps us safe.
Some pain comes and goes quickly (we call this acute pain), while other pain stays around for a long time–we call this chronic pain.
Understanding Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is like…
…a car alarm
Sometimes a car alarm can go off even when there is no sign of danger. Sometimes a car just needs to be gently bumped in order to activate the car alarm. Some car alarms are very sensitive, while others hardly go off at all. The purpose of the car alarm is to alert other people that the car is in danger. However, when the alarm goes off accidentally and there is no sign of danger, it’s just a false alarm. Cars with sensitive alarms send out more false alarms and people with more sensitive nervous systems can also have more false alarms (aka, pain sensations). Now that we better understanding what chronic pain is, watch the video below to learn about how pain can get in the way of doing activities you want and need to be doing.…a doorbell
Chronic pain is like a doorbell that goes haywire. Usually when you press a doorbell, it rings one house, one time, and that is all. But, in the case of chronic pain, it’s as if the doorbell on one house rings every house on the block. And the doorbell doesn’t just ring once, it rings all day and all night. 
…a software glitch
Chronic pain is like a software glitch. When your computer freezes or crashes, it’s almost always a software glitch. If you looked inside the computer, you wouldn’t find anything wrong with the hardware. Chronic pain is a problem with the software. Sometimes there is an initial error to the hardware in the body (bones, muscles, organs), but the software continues to glitch after the hardware is repaired and continues to send messages to the body that there is a glitch in the system.
How do we Treat Chronic Pain?
Remember that pain is interpreted by the brain. The brain decides how much pain we feel. Scientists have found that if the brain is distracted from the pain, we don’t feel as much pain as we would if the brain were paying attention to the pain. This finding led to the idea of a “gate” that exists between the spinal cord and brain that allows or prevents signals from the nerve endings getting into the brain. To treat chronic pain, we focus on skills and techniques that help to close the gate and help you do those things more often.
What Closes the Gate?
What Opens the Gate?
Increased daily functioning
Relaxation
Distraction
Stress management
Focusing on the pain
Inactivity
Poor sleep
High stress, anxiety, or other negative emotions
During iGET Living, you will be learning skills and techniques to close your gate to pain signals. Different things work for different people and this is a space for you to figure out what works for you!
That’s all for today! See you tomorrow