We always try to provide each and every patient with the highest level of care, but every once in a while someone feels that we let them down for one reason or another. We always try to rectify the problem, because we never want a patient to feel abandoned if they had an issue. Recently, a patient left a review stating that we should research “what chronic pain does to your demeanor.”

Chronic pain is extremely complex and affects everyone differently, but one thing we feel that we understand way better than the average person is how chronic pain affects a person’s demeanor. Each day we’re helping patients navigate the physical and mental challenges presented by their chronic pain condition, and as we’ve documented on the blog in the past, we’ve also dealt with chronic pain personally. Again, all pain is different, but we’re certainly no stranger to how chronic pain can weigh heavy on a person and lead to personality or mood changes.

In an effort to help reach out to the person who left the review, and to shine a light on a problem that is oftentimes overlooked, we thought we’d devote a whole blog to better understanding how chronic pain can affect a person’s demeanor.

Chronic Pain And Your Demeanor

Chronic pain can affect your demeanor in a number of ways. If you’re constantly in physical pain, or you’re avoiding certain activities because they could cause pain, it’s going to have an affect on your psyche. It’s completely reasonable and even expected for chronic pain patients to be at a heightened risk for things like:

• Irritability
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Lack of motivation
• Mood swings
• Worry
• Short temper

The physical reason behind this is rather obvious. It’s not fun to constantly be in pain or in fear of pain, and that constant threat of pain can leave us in a sour mood. But pain also has a significant affect on the brain. Pain can disrupt normal brain cell communication and foster increased feelings of doubt, worry or anxiety. Moreover, the stress from dealing with a chronic pain condition can lead to bio-mechanical changes in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain that helps to regulate emotions. In other words, things are happening behind the scenes that actually affect how your brain regulates emotion.

So it’s not just that pain is making you more irritable because you’re physically uncomfortable, changes in how your brain communicates and the chemicals it produces can actually lead to changes in your demeanor. And while that can be scary, the fact that we understand this relationship is helpful in how we work to effectively treat it. Treating chronic pain isn’t just about healing the physical injury, it’s also about carefully managing the brain and working to improve cell communication to help reduce stress and the impact the physical pain is having on your entire body.

The biggest obstacle to effectively treating the totality of a chronic pain condition is how unique pain is to an individual. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will take care of a person’s body and mind. That’s also why chronic pain is rarely solved in just one visit. The provider really needs to understand the patient in order to address all aspects of their condition that are affecting their health. The process can be frustrating at times, but we know that you’ll come out better for it because we’ll be working to treat the physical, mental and emotional aspects of chronic pain.

We may not fully understand how chronic pain has affected your demeanor, but trust us when we say that we want to learn how it has and help to develop solutions to get both your mind and body back to a healthy place. If you’re having any mental or physical issues relating to your chronic pain condition, please reach out. We’ll do everything we can to find an individualized solution to your issue. For more information, give our team a call today at (952) 738-4580.