Brain Space – Pain Mastery

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Donald Wilson

Brain Space of Sensory Strip = Amount of Neuron Cells = Sensitivity

This is an image of the sensory strip, which is the part of the brain involved in experiencing sensations in the body. — Week 1 Relieving Skills for the Physical Intensity of PAIN

Here is an image of the sensory strip. The view point is as if you are looking at a person’s face, right into this particularly cross-section of their brain. The body drawing on the outside demonstrates the region of that strip that is typically devoted to sensations from those body parts. Thus, you can see just how weird the proportions really are with very large face and hands compared to everything else! When we introduce this skill we also choose to add the option of a focus on the feet. Although the sensations from the feet don’t take up a huge amount of brain space, they are are still proportionally larger and on such a different part of the sensory strip that it can really move the attention away from other painful parts.

Lessons from this week’s lesson

In this week’s lesson on managing pain, I learned some new concepts about how pain functions in the brain, as well as on how to take something I already knew, and provide a better and more purposeful way to use it to reduce my experience of pain in my body.

The main points of this lesson are as follow:

Pain is experienced in the brain, after information is sent to the brain through neurons transmitted through the spinal cord.
Passively attending to something in your body, other than the pain, will reduce the experience of pain to some degree or other. Sometimes this reduction in the experience of pain is significant, sometimes not.
Actively creating a mechanical distraction, especially in the area of the body which is experiencing the pain, can have a positive effect on that pain.
Interestingly, by creating a mechanical action, such as shaking your hand if you injure a finger or burn yourself, will reduce significantly the amount of pain actually experienced, by actively reducing the signal from the pain receptors in getting to the brain. This takes place in the spinal cord itself, rather than in the brain, so the reduction in the pain can be very effective.

Concentrating your attention on some part of your body not currently experiencing pain can help reduce that pain.

Now, lets stop thinking about the theory of pain, and think about what the theory of pain is teaching me. If I can move my attention from focusing on a specific cause of pain to focussing on some other part of my body, such as my face or ears, for example, I can significantly reduced my experience of the pain. This reduction is my experience of pain is relatively mild, for me, at this point, but it serves to reduce my experience of neuropathic pain from excruciating to merely troubling, a huge gain since when it is only troubling I can often drift off into sleep, which is nearly impossible when my neuropathic pain in my feet is most extreme.

Through practice and the investment of some time I hope to increase the effectiveness of this pain strategy, which holds out some promise in being an active tool to improve my current experience of pain.

The second strategy in this chapter of the course on Mastering Pain, is about a more physically active method, and requires some mechanical actions to be taken. So, when the pain in my hands or feet is most severe instead of mentally focussing on another part of my body, I use an action to draw my attentions elsewhere. This action can be pretty simple, such as playing with my car keys or making a cup of tea, and really paying attention to what I’m doing, rather than dwelling on my neuropathic pain.

Doing something physical, like washing a load of dishes in the sink, can sometimes be an effective distraction to even quite severe pain. It won’t make it go away, but it may help make it more bearable.

You’d be surprised at how often this helps reduce the experience of pain, sometimes by a lot, depending on how absorbing the actions being taken are, and depending on how seriously I focus on them.

Before I started taking this program I think I intuitively already knew some of this information, without knowing the underlying physiology of the spinal cord and the part of the brain responsible for experiencing pain.

A significant part of the benefit of taking this program is the development of a more organized and deliberate strategy for dealing with my everyday pain, in ways that improve my experience of life through my own conscious efforts, without taking opioids or other pain killers to deal with the pain. A major goal of Mastering Pain is to create a Personal Toolbox of resources to assist with what has become a major preoccupation of my life, the toleration and management of chronic pain.

For me, the alternatives to doing this program seem few and very unattractive. I have no willingness to go down the road of pharmaceutical solutions for my pain, unless I absolutely have no choice, in order to tolerate the ever increasing amount of pain in my life. It may be that at some point I won’t be able to function, whatsoever, without pain medications, but I intend to push that day off as long as possible.

Note on formatting

Up until this week I was using a Drop Cap for the first letter of each paragraph in my blog. I recently received feedback from a mobile reader, using her cell phone, that said that the Drop Caps were screwing up her ability to follow my blog, by throwing text all over the place, when viewed on her phone. So I’m not going to use them in this blog from now on.

Different Pain Management Strategies – Brain Maps

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Donald Wilson

Mastering Pain is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We believe there is more than one road for you to take out of the pain maze. Your road to pain mastery may have already followed many paths. Along the way you may have tried a number of different treatment options including medicines, injections, adjustments, acupuncture, massage, physical therapy, and a whole host of other products or services. Some of these may have worked, some may not have worked. It is important to recognize that everyone responds differently.

The first part in the upper left corner of the pain block is **PHYSICAL INTENSITY**. This is that 0-10 rating of how LOUD the pain signal is. This is what we are usually aiming to reduce to when we try new medications or other treatments.

The second part in the upper right corner of the pain block is the **AGONY** of pain. Pain is one of the class of sensations that when it hits the brain, also activates other parts of the brain that create emotional responses. Pain is not alone in this ability to activate more than just sensation. Think of the agitation that is elicited by an itch, or the panic when you catch your breath, or the pleasure of sensual touch. Pain activates the emotional pathway of agony, it is an intense bothersomeness. Interestingly, as you will learn, pain does not have to activate this agony pathway all the time – we just have to teach our brains how to change it.

The third part in the lower right hand corner of the pain block is **IMPACT**. The Impact of pain is all the ways that pain affects our lives. The impact in our lives is far reaching including our sleep, energy, stamina, movement, social life, our ability to work the way we used to, our costs of living, memory, mood, and even our sense of who we are as a person.

*The fourth part of pain in the lower left hand corner of the pain block is **NEGATIVE STIGMA**. Stigma is pervasive in our society. The bias against individuals is very real and destructive.*

The most important thing about the MPM program is that it is highly systematic and based on the scientific method. As a chronic pain sufferer I know that I have tried many different approaches to mitigate or deal with my pain. I tried pain killers, physiotherapy, exercise, anti-inflammatory drugs, sleep aids, music… even sex and other intense emotional and physical interactions to try to drown out the noise of pain. None of them make the pain go away, but sometimes I have felt some amelioration of the pain. For me the most consistently successful of these strategies has been distraction from the experience of pain by focussing my attentions on some other thing, usually an interaction with another person, or sometimes a creative visualization of an intense subject.

The key to the method taught in my course, however, is not the specific technique itself that worked, or didn’t work, but he careful examination of various approaches using the scientific method, to test a number of potentially helpful strategies, in an orderly manner. Those that seem most promising are then examined in the context of the other methods, with the eventual idea that some of these may be even more effective if combined together.

Interesting enough, the very fact of dispassionately examining what has worked in the past in an organized fashion itself helps to ameliorate some of the pain by lessening my fear that it will continue to be out of my control altogether. No matter how sever the pain seems at any given moment, it is made far worse by my imagining that it will only ever get worse, and the fear itself tends to increase my awareness and sensitivity to my pain. Analysis actually substantive reduces the experience of pain but bringing it into the realm of personal control. Believing that I can control the pain, to any significant degree, actually helps me control the pain, to a degree.

Here is a sneak peak at what is in store for me as I follow the Mastering Pain Management training program.

Activate Endogenous Opioids – Ever wish you could feel that “high” that runners talk about, but know you aren’t about to go run 12 miles? That high is from our body’s own opioid system and it doesn’t require running to trigger it. In fact, there are a number of ways to turn to the system on. The biological evidence shows that we can do this on your own in just a few minutes. While some of the skills might involve imagination, the effect is not imaginary, the opioids are real, the response is real, and the science to demonstrate the process is real. These are some of the most powerful IMMEDIATE RELIEF skills of the Mastering Pain Method. In person, we have witnessed an average of a 50% drop in pain intensity. Its now your turn to discover how well the skills work for you.
Retrain Sensory and Motor Nerves – Learn how to have mastery over out-of-control sensory nerves and motor nerves that are keeping muscles guarded and tight or sending signals to the brain that aren’t helpful.
Rewire Agony/Suffering Circuitry – Change the patterns in your brain that make pain so unbearable. Clear cut evidence exists showing that we can change the way our brains respond to pain and only experience it as a sensation without all the agony and suffering that is usually associated with it.
Train Vagal Tone/Relaxation Response – Pain is so overwhelming and activates our danger sensors leading to adrenaline bursts from the fight or flight response. To calm this response we can train a special system, the Relaxation Response, that is associated with the Vagus Nerve.
Engage Pleasure Circuitry – Change the patterns in your brain that make pain so unbearable. Clear cut evidence exists showing that we can change the way our brains respond to pain and only experience it as a sensation without all the agony and suffering that is usually associated with it.
Engage Restorative/Anti-Inflammatory Systems – Our body produces inflammation when stressed. And the body is clearly stressed by pain. Regardless of the cause of the pain learning how to put a stop to the inflammation is critical – even more so when the cause of the pain is an inflammatory condition. Our bodies’ are amazing full of ifferent ways to stop and start inflammation. Learning to turn off inflammation and turn on the restorative systems.
Retrain Interpersonal Neurobiology – Our body responds when we interact with others. It has certain patterns of responses to different environmental cues. These patterns impact our sense of self and our relationships. Learn how retraining these
skills can improve pain and begin the trend to change the cultural stigma of chronic pain.

It often seems highly hypothetical to consider that pain may be somewhat controllable by following a road map of different strategies in an organized and systematic manner. My sincerest hope is that the program is right, and I can learn to have a much higher level of control than I have at the present time. Many years ago I took a training course in personal development which taught me that “understanding is the booby prize” by which the trainers meant that it is in doing something rather than in understanding something that lies the potential for real change in human experience. However, without the “booby prize” of understanding the nature of pain, and systematically examining what works and doesn’t for me, I am highly unlikely to accidently come upon actions which will have any significant effect over the long run, or even have any real impact on a moment by moment basis.

Mastering Pain

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Donald Wilson

Mastering Pain Method – The Basics

Welcome to the orientation course for the Mastering Pain Method training. These are the core lessons of the Mastering Pain Method, providing insight into the overwhelming problem with pain in our society, the biological root of all pain experiences, the key scientific principles of pain mastery, and the biological rationales for each and every tool taught.

Learning Objectives:

To be able to describe the primary physical systems we can change to change the pain experience.
To be able to identify how these primary systems match the complex components of pain on our pain compass.

These core lessons are aimed at providing the framework for all future lessons. We developed these lessons to give you clearer understanding of the Mastering Pain Method, the rationale, the ins and outs of the approach, the goals, and the basics of biological basis for the skills training.

In response to reading my blog, one reader suggested that I might consider changing my point of view about pain, and perhaps stop fighting it. Instead it is suggested that perhaps changing this might actually improve my long term experience of pain, and perhaps make it more something I can live with and accomodate rather than something that continues to drive me crazy every day.

After reading his response to my blog I decided to go online and see if there were any other approaches to pain management I could take on myself. I should say, non drug treatment that might hold out hope for a better life in the future for me.
Needless to say, this is a newer approach for me, but one not without precedence. For years and years I believed that diabetes was a disease about which I could do little, except take the medications prescribed for me by my doctors and try my best to accept that it was inevitable. The truth is that I always had more control over the disease than I was willing to exercise, and if I had really understand it, I could have begun addressing my diabetic behaviour years and years ago.

Maybe I could have avoided diabetic neuropathy and a whole host of other problems I’ve had as a result of my diabetes.

But I failed to listen to options which might actually have helped, and now am faced with having to make substantive changes I should have made years ago.

The same thing may be true about pain. Pain is happening in my body. Whose body? Mine. As it has increased over the past five years I have merely been dreading it’s inevitable progress as I have experienced more and more pain. Well, that’s done.

My first step towards managing my pain is for me to understand it better. Thus the Mastering Pain Institute, and their program of study to better understand our pain, and to do something about it.

I am adding this to my journey of fasting and lifestyle changes in order to save my own life, and to improve it as much as is possible from what I learn.

I’m looking forward to learning more.