5 Ways to Naturally Decrease Pain using a Holistic and Mindful Approach
I remember laying on the floor in my living room praying to God to take away my pain. I was doing all of the right things. My legs where “up the wall”, I had exercised, ate anti-inflammatory foods, meditated, and did my gratitude practice. . . but the pain was worse than ever.
As an enneagram 7 I am usually all fun and games, I self admittedly work just barely hard enough to get through the day so I can reward myself with something fun. However, this also means in times of stress I turn into the investigative type.
So, I dove into the rabbit holes of the internet to find where I had gone astray. That’s when I discovered the missing link.
Well, more like the daunting cloud that shades everything than an actual missing link.
That black cloud, was Stress.
Stress negates all that other stuff; stress worsened my pain and stress clouded my life during this particular season. This was also the time period where my boss went to prison. (If you want to see how I made it through that crazy time and find out more details about that wild year click HERE).
Ever since then, pain has fascinated me. Not in a “hmmm that’s interesting” kind of way, but in more of a “I am determined to figure this out” kind of way.
Recently I did a podcast interview with Dr. Mekel Harris. She is a licensed pediatric and family health psychologist and some of her work focuses around health-related trauma. I asked her onto the show to find out how exactly stress and mental health particularly anxiety, effect our pain.
The interview is fantastic and so insightful. Give it a listen HERE.
In our Conquer Your Pain: A Drug-Free Guide to Healing TM, eLearning Program we teach people how to have less pain, control their stress and have more energy so they can live a more joyful life, we teach people several of the things discussed but as per usual, this interview taught me some valuable things.
One of my biggest takeaways was that if we can re-frame the way that we think about our pain and the self-talk that we use regarding our pain then we can distance ourselves from it, and hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously. For example, you can have pain and still have a great shopping trip with a friend. If we talk about our pain differently then pain and good things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I used to think that I couldn’t do anything fun or happy on painful days because in my mind, pain stopped me or soreness held me back from living my life.
She talked about how pain is meant to be a warning sign, like the check engine light on our car. We acknowledge it, address the issue and move on. NOT, a backpack that we carry around 24/7.
After talking this through with Dr. Mekel Harris I changed that too, even though it’s a painful day, I can still have fun, my pain is not a prison.