The Brain, Body, Pain Connection
Unfortunately, about 1 in 5 adults in Australia will experience chronic pain. It is a complex condition that is experienced differently person to person.
Chronic Pain may be caused by illness, musculoskeletal problems, surgery, injury, cancer, and sometimes there is no apparent cause.
Chronic pain can impact your sleep and mood. It can also cause anxiety and depression. It can impact your day-to-day activities including work and family life. It’s not much fun at all.
For hundreds (if not thousands) of years people have been effectively using hypnotherapy for chronic pain.
Fortunately, over the last few years people much smarter than I have uncovered the body-brain connection and identified how the body and mind creates pain. It’s rather interesting….
This new information means that now more than ever we have more angles to use hypnotherapy for chronic pain. It does however mean there is a little trial and error in the beginning to see what works for each individual, but it does mean that we can create a more effective outcomes in the long run.
I have popped together a little infographic below that briefly explains how pain is created in the body. Pain is a way for the mind and body to let us know when we need a little extra care (to rest or repair) however when we experience chronic pain things become more complicated, this is where hypnotherapy for chronic pain can be helpful.
Essentially:
- Skin, bone and muscles contain sensors that respond to physical injury. These sensors send information through the dorsal horn through the spinal cord, to the brain.
- The amount of information about pain/sensation that is allowed to get to the brain depends on how open or closed the pain gate in the spinal cord is.
- The information from the body does not always produce pain. Pain is just a sensation until certain structures of the brain work together and become active. It is the brain that decides which sensations are pain and which are not.
- Chronic pain can cause long lasting changes in the brain that affect how you feel pain in the future. Unfortunately, it is like the brain learns to feel pain more easily, so that over time it takes less and less sensations from the body to activate the pain systems in the brain.
- The good news, pain can be relieved by interrupting the structures and systems in the brain that create pain through hypnotherapy for chronic pain.
Keep an eye out for our next post and I’ll share a little more on the parts of the brain that play a role in creating pain and how hypnotherapy for chronic pain can help.
