Day 4 In Pain...help what to do/believe

[cookie_777]

So today for an arts class, we had to do this drawing that required a lot of bending over the thing we were sketching. I did the work for about an hour, literally ignoring the pain, pushing through like it didn't exist, but my shoulder and back muscles were on FIRE, like, screaming for me to stop bending, and I was thinking 'no cookie, your back is fine' but a part of me was still wondering like, i my back is normal what is this very real pain? Any thoughts on how TMS pain work, especially when you do physical activity... Is physical activity supposed to stop hurting?

 

[Andy Bayliss]

Hi cookie,

No, if you're in pain, and you keep doing the activity that is apparently "causing the pain," much of the time the pain simply persists. But, in the action of ignoring it by continuing the activity, you are sending a deep signal to yourself that you don't care about the distraction the pain is trying to give you. The effect of this practice takes some time to begin to work. In the meantime, you can slowly increase activity. You can see Alan Gordon's work at the Wiki referred to as Outcome independence, for more help on this.

In my experience, I started very slowly, and increased activity over a few months.

Andy B