Everyone is adjusting to the new normal. Life has been turned upside down and inside out, and there is a new agenda every day. Most of us are locked in at home, with the new goal being trying to stay safe and healthy. If you are a parent, now you have to become a teacher alongside all your other responsibilities. If you are a senior citizen, you may think you are young but now you have a new target on your back and the challenge is to stay alive.  If you are lucky you still have a job.  However, almost everyone is worried about what is next, whether it is financial issues, the ability to obtain food or toilet paper shortages. Beyond these, one still has the regular health concerns and for many their chronic pain is now compounded by added stress.  

The normal now is everything is likely to change, and constant change is stressful to most people. Not knowing what tomorrow will bring and the fear of the unknown is common nowadays. Everyone is stressed since life has radically changed. Having chronic pain from any source now can feel worse. It is not a part of your imagination; it is due to the fact that many of the centers in the brain that help transfer pain signals are adjacent to the stress and anxiety centers.  Therefore, stress and anxiety can be perceived by the brain through a short circuit caused by added stress. As one becomes stressed about change, pain increases.  

Treating The Physical And Emotional Components Of Pain

Treating physical ailments has always been the strength of the medical profession. Recognizing a broken bone or a cervical or lumbar disc issue is relatively easy, since we can see it on an imaging test. The pain a malady causes is more complex since it requires a sensory nerve to be stimulated and the brain to perceive and interpret the signal as an abnormal event. The act of interpreting sensory transmissions is partly based on a person’s experience of similar signals and their emotional responses to those types of sensations in the past.

For many people, the emotional components of pain in the past are neutral in importance. For others, the signals have strong negative stressful associations with traumatic experiences and then pain and stress become linked in the brain as the same events. Recognizing this association of pain and stress becomes vital in the management of controlling chronic pain.

The pain everyone suffers is real. However, most pain has both physical and emotional factors. identifying and treating the physical aspects of pain is much easier. Treating these aspects of pain are in ways the simple “cookbook” parts of management strategies, i.e. if you are having X symptoms, do Y, and so forth. When pain becomes more chronic, understanding and working with the emotional components to pain are often critical to its control. Treating the person’s perceptions and emotions associated with the pain become critical. A person is much more than just a broken bone or spine problem, and treatment often needs to include managing the brain’s perception of sensory signals.  

Successful pain management often involves dealing with not only the physical generators of sensory signals, but also how the brain is responding to those signals directly and emotionally. A person is not weak or crazy when there are emotional components to pain. Using cognitive and psychological techniques to treat these parts of pain is challenging but very important in being able to reduce the intensity of signals. When successful treatment of central interpretive components of pain occurs, the relative intensity of signals markedly diminishes.

So as the world seems to be collapsing in the throes of a pandemic and stress and anxiety are increasing, it is common to see those with pain issues having increased intensity of symptoms. The brain is a complex structure, and everything that it perceives is often subject to interpretation. Pain is no different and stress has a large impact on the perception of sensory signals, especially those delivering messages of trauma and inflammation. Treating the brain and how it is interpreting sensory signals often becomes the key necessary to unlock the successful management of pain.