Lower Back Pain Relief. Now.
How to treat chronic pain so you can work, play and sleep better
Living in pain everyday
As I go about my daily life, one thing has become abundantly clear. Chronic pain is a way of life for many. All around me, I see and hear that people are hurting. And though low back pain is a common complaint for so many, no part of the body seems immune.
A dinner date with friends revealed that five of the six ladies at the table were collectively experiencing knee pain, hip and lower back pain, neck and shoulder pain, and pain from chemotherapy. Likewise, a visit with my hairdresser, co-worker, parents, workout partner, and pastor uncovered one complaint of pain after another.
I think it’s safe to say, chronic pain has become an epidemic
Are you suffering from chronic pain?
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Back, neck, shoulder, hand, knee, hip, foot pain
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Pain while sitting, standing, walking, running
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Difficulty walking up and down stairs
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Pain getting up from the floor or chair
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Arthritis, stiffness
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Repetitive use injuries
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Fibromyalgia
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Joint replacement
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Bunions, plantar fasciitis
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And the list goes on...
Discouraged from finding no solutions, we sadly come to accept our daily pain as a normal part of life and a natural result of aging.
What does chronic pain mean?
Chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts for over 3 months. The pain may be there all the time or it may come and go. It can be nagging at best and debilitating at worst. Either way, it takes a toll on your physical and mental health, making it difficult to perform routine daily activities, and it prevents you from doing things you love. It's one of the most common reasons people seek medical care.
Chronic pain can lead to depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, impaired cognitive functioning, the ability to work outside the home, and difficulty maintaining relationships with friends and family. You can get caught in a vicious cycle of pain and response which can actually make your pain worse. And it’s a really difficult cycle to break.
Chronic pain and the brain
Life happens... Injuries, illnesses, aging, surgeries, accidents. And with them, pain.
And though no one likes it, pain is necessary for our health, safety, and well-being. It lets us know that something is wrong or that we’re doing damage to our body. It forces us to stay off, avoid using, and protect that broken, torn, injured part of our body that needs time to heal.
The problem comes after the crisis is over. Once the broken bone is healed, the torn muscle repaired, and the sprained ligament restored, the pain should go away. It's not needed anymore. But often, instead of going away, the pain persists and often spreads to other places.
And the reason lies in the brain.
The brain is charged with the responsibility of our survival. Around-the-clock, it organizes all of our thoughts, movements, and emotions to keep us safe and alive. From birth, our brain begins mapping our body into movement patterns that allow us to move in a myriad of ways.
After an injury or trauma, the brain works to reorganize the way our body functions, taking into account the need to protect the injured part. Once the injury is healed, we live in a reorganized body that is different from the body we had pre-injury. We need to retrain our brain to include the injured part back into the picture to keep other parts of our body from being overworked. It's this unequal distribution of work and effort that leads to chronic pain.
But it doesn't even take a traumatic event for chronic pain to rear its ugly head.
Lower back pain from sitting
We have become a very sedentary society. I read the average person sits anywhere from 7 - 12 hours a day. That puts most of us in the medium risk (4 - 8 hours a day) to high risk (8+ hours a day) category in terms of our health.
For hours a day, we sit rounded in our chair, craning our neck to look at our computer screen, hunching our shoulders to type on our keyboard, and aggravating our wrists and fingers with repetitive typing motions.
Meanwhile, these habitual movement patterns are being grooved into our brain, and over time, because our body is not built structurally to perform best in this posture, pain often results.
The good news is, it's possible to find relief from pain that's been bothering you for years.
Learn how to reduce pain, move with greater ease, and increase your range of motion by replacing existing destructive movement habits that are the source of the pain with new, liberating patterns.
