P: 308-872-5800 F: 308-872-5803
2021 South E St., Suite #1 Broken Bow, NE 68822
What is Chronic Pain?
How many of your 2024 New Year’s Resolutions came to fruition?
The first and most important change when starting your pain management journey is to understand why you are experiencing pain. Chronic pain is like a fire alarm system that's been calibrated to be too sensitive, alerting you to a fire where there is none. It can be caused by ongoing damage (e.g. osteoarthritis); however, in some cases there may be no cause or the injury has already healed...yet the pain persists. Chronic pain often begins as acute pain. Pain is there to say “Hey, let's not do that again..." and it's an important part of keeping you safe and healthy. However, the brain can get "stuck" in a feedback loop, registering injury where there may no longer be one. If the pain has persisted over three months and the original injury has healed, the pain is no longer protecting you. It's limiting you, instead. So how do you shut off the false alarm and recalibrate the system so that it stops sending pain signals to the brain?
This is where a physical therapist can become a huge asset. Physical therapy is not and should not be easy. We're going to be making you move more than you have in months, even years. And for someone who's been in so much pain for so long, that can be intimidating. But a key focus of physical therapy is progressive goal setting. We start you out slow, with gentle movements that help restore your confidence in the painful area and “re-wire” your brain to not see these types of activities as dangerous. We take your goals in mind when creating a program specifically tailored to you.
This sort of approach takes time and you may not see progress at the speed you were expecting. Setting smaller goals such as “I want to be able to walk from the car to the cafe without having to stop,” or “I want to be able to sit through a quarter of basketball without having to get up,” are reasonable places to start. Additionally, physical therapy doesn’t just happen in the clinic. Rather, our therapists provide exercises and strategies, micro-habits, that you can utilize every day to keep progressing toward your larger goal: NO MORE PAIN.
Technically, all pain is in your head. It doesn't mean the pain isn't real, but it does mean that you can't always count on it to be entirely honest with you. Understanding that pain doesn't always mean danger is a huge piece to breaking the chronic pain cycle. The difficult part is breaking that larger piece into more manageable goals.
If you've been "taking it easy" for a month or two and
then try to return to your previous level of activity your
body is going to raise the alarm again. Your muscles are
weak and tight; they're not used to be worked hard.
They're going to freak out when you increase their
workload and they'll send pain signals to the brain telling you to "slow down" and the pain returns just as strong as before.
Many of us make great plans for the upcoming year, only for life to get in the way. We’re busy and change, big change, is hard. The same can be said when we’re in pain. When we’re frustrated by something like chronic pain, we want to make as much progress as we can as quickly as we can. When we set goals, most of us like to aim high: NO MORE PAIN. While that may be desired outcome, it’s hard to measure progress along that line. Big changes can require a lot of time, energy, and even money. The intentions are good, but most of us lack the resources to make these changes stick, and the failure to do so can lead us to give up entirely. Instead, if we focus on small, measurable goals, we can celebrate on the little “wins” along our path. These small changes, called micro-habits of health, can be both good habits we add to our routine and also bad habits we drop. As these micro-habits come together, their sum becomes the key to reaching our ultimate goal: NO MORE PAIN.
Breaking the Cycle