Most people assume pain is mostly just physical which can easily be solved by a lot of pain management techniques. While it is true that most physical pain can be treated, pain, on the other hand, go much further than physical and affects the mind and your life in general too.
It Affects Your Body Inside And Out
Makes It A Struggle To Sleep
Lack of sleep isn’t something to be overlooked. It’s important for everyone to get sleep and wake up well rested because when you do, you feel better, look better, and work better. However, the problem is that more and more people are having a hard time getting proper shut eye due to pain-inducing imbalances in your body that disturb body and brain communication and affects sleep,
You might not realize this, but often times the reason why you’re tossing and turning under the covers is because you’re body’s central circadian rhythms are disturbed. This happens when there are misalignments in the spine that are keeping your body from being relaxed enough to sleep. Spinal adjustments improve the blood flow in your nervous system and correct any subluxation.
Throws Your Metabolism And Digestion Off
Stress and emotions can be felt in the gut due to the brain and gut connection. This is why you get those butterflies in the stomach during first dates or that clenching in your gut when you realized you missed an important deadline. So when you’re stressed out (which is a form of pain) your digestion and metabolism can go haywire.
But good thing chiropractic care can help with this since the spine is a huge part of the nervous system, it is responsible for many functions in your body which includes your digestive system. So with regular chiropractic session, you may find that your metabolism and digestion have improved. Though the result may vary from person to person, you might find that it helps you lose weight or a regular bathroom schedule.
You Become Inactive Little By Little
The thing with chronic pain is that aside from the excruciating pain it often comes with fatigue too. Daily routine feels so much harder and the day feels so much longer because you barely have enough energy to even get out of bed much less run your errands and chores. That’s just the normal daily level of pain where you’re still able to go about your day though struggling. But when a flare up happens that a whole league of its own. This is when you basically stay in bed for days because even the act of adjusting your body on the bed or going to the toilet already feels like a marathon. The pain becomes unimaginable and then it just feel like your soul escaped your body because you just don’t have the energy at all which creates a cycle of inactivity.
It Takes A Toll On Your Mind
Affects Memory And Concentration
Living everyday life while struggling with pain is bound to affect your mental health. When that happens you’ll start noticing you’re not as together as you usually are, and it becomes difficult for you to concentrate on whatever task you have at hand because you’re simultaneously thinking about other things. Getting your spine adjusted corrects misalignments that may have been sitting in your spine and causing pain and discomfort. Aside from that it also eases muscle tension along with it. Both of these helps balance your nervous system.
You Get Those Annoying Headaches Often
The greatest majority of primary headaches are associated with muscle tension in the neck and upper back. This is especially true for those who spend hours fixed in one position like sitting in front of a computer. In this case, a chiropractor can perform spinal manipulation or chiropractic adjustments to improve spinal function and alleviate the stress on your system which then helps eliminate headache.
It Affects Your Mood
Unfortunately, living with pain can affect a person’s mood by making someone more susceptible to emotional changes that can foster depression, anxiety, and fear. Such mood disorders can also promote a person’s dependence on prescription medications designed to treat the pain, such as opioids. The more scared, alone or sadness they feel, the more likely they are abuse certain medications, which temporarily mask the pain by providing a “euphoric” feeling. However, when these effects wear off, the sense of hopelessness and discomfort return, so this can soon develop into a vicious cycle.
It Alters Your Life
The Social Stigma
Partly because chronic pain is a personal and subjective experience not to mention comes with invisible symptoms, patients face a huge stigma in addition to having disabling symptoms. People don’t understand the totally of the condition, so patients of chronic pain are often misunderstood why they had to miss an important occasion “just because of a back pain”, mocked by “exaggerating” the severity of the pain to gain sympathy or attention, or not believed altogether thinking that they’re just “faking it” to get out of a situation or responsibility. When patients don’t have any outward sign of suffering like a cast or bandage, they tend to easily dismiss it since “you look fine”. What many people don’t realize is how debilitating and life disrupting chronic pain is.
You Lose Opportunities And Makes Sacrifices All The Time
There’s a hefty price tag attached to the many potential opportunities that intractable pain stops dead in their tracks. Sometimes grieving over what might have been can be just as difficult as coping with what is. If you had to end your career early, curtail socializing, give up traveling, limit driving, miss important time with family/friends, or narrow your operating world significantly, then you understand sacrifice, limitations and/or lost opportunity.
The Pain Dictates Your Schedule Now
When you have chronic pain, you lose a huge chunk of time not just for yourself but as well as the people around you. You will feel unproductive all the time because of not being able to finish your work or even work at all for days when the pain is really bad. And then you also find yourself cancelling a lot of plans because you’re spent and can’t even take another step around the house. And when you do finally make it to an appointment, even though you’re glad to spend time with family or friends, you’re also itching to go home because your energy level is dropping by the minute and every muscle in your body is begging for the bed. Losing years of life quantity and quality is definitely one of the biggest unaffordable losses for a lot of chronic pain patients. It’s no wonder then that no one likes to talk about the subtraction effect that ongoing pain has on his or her lifetime.