Sitting still with Discomfort

For those of you with brain or nervous system sensitisation who find it hard to relax — how do you handle the discomfort (both the pain and the inner restlessness)?

I’ve noticed that when I try to sit still and “be with” the discomfort, it can sometimes make my brain feel even more alarmed — almost like it interprets the stillness and restlessness together as a sign of danger.

So I’m wondering: is it actually helpful to sit with the discomfort through things like meditation, or is it better to stay engaged with life and activity?

When you’re engaged, you still carry the sensations, but your focus isn’t directly on them, so the threat level seems lower. But if you’re sitting in meditation and start to feel more irritable or agitated, could that actually be reinforcing the sense of danger rather than reducing it? I know Diana is a fan of meditation so what appreciate her views

During allowing e.g. meditation etc:
Focus on inner sensations - MORE FOCUS on Pain/Discomfort -> MORE uncomfortable -> feeling uneasy -> brain picks this up as threat -> Danger -> more Pain/Discomfort.

During engaging with life etc:
Focus on outer environment - LESS FOCUS on Pain/Discomfort -> LESS uncomfortable -> feeling LESS uneasy -> brain picks this up as LESS OF A threat -> LESS Danger -> LESS spike of Pain/Discomfort.

Would love to hear how others have approached this.

 

When you invite the symptoms it's common for them to increase. That's the principle of trauma healing, teaching the brain to process the information activating the pre-frontal cortex, and not the amygdala. It needs to be done from a place of safety, hence all those techniques like messages of safety, breathing, distancing, pendulation, vagus nerve stimulation etc.

You do small chunks of that during the day, and proceed and focus on other activities. Since pain is an alarm, it's totally ok to have your mind getting worried when you're living your life. For that I recommend the DARE approach, which is basically noticing the worry and tell it it doesn't need to go away, but you're not buying into the drama.

 

Hi, Mike,
I think I’ve read here on the forum that some people get more agitated by meditation like you’re describing. I guess that wouldn’t be useful. Maybe it affects people differently. If it makes you more nervous, I wouldn’t do it. See what you can find that works for you. It sounds like engaging in life makes you feel better. It makes me feel better too.

 

As you know, sitting is a remaining issue on my personal 'losing TMS journey'. I am gradually training myself (taking baby steps, with patience and persistence) to sit for longer and longer periods on a relatively uncomfortable hard upright chair with only a thin bit of foam cushion for my derrière. And I am succeeding in this. What's working for me is a mixture of:

1) I sit on my hard chair and, despite the pain and discomfort, I get engrossed in a TV programme/show... this tells my brain I'm not in any danger otherwise I wouldn't be watching TV. I watch as much comedy as I can because my smiles and laughter communicate to my brain that I'm in a safe situation.
2) I talk to my brain and say to it in response to the pain and discomfort: "Don't be stupid" and/or "You're being ridiculous" and often the intensity perceptibly lessens a bit, but even if it doesn't, I still keep saying it, quite a number of times. (I don't focus on whether the sensations lessen or not though - I stay outcome independent, but I noticed that when I first talked to my brain like that the symptoms lessened so I know it's getting me heading in the right direction and therefore I keep doing it.)
3) I don't meditate while sitting but I do focus on slowing down my breathing... I make my out breaths longer. I don't do it all the time I'm sitting but I keep returning to doing it for a while, 'pendulating' between what I'm doing whilst I'm sitting and paying attention to my breath, intermittently. This tells my brain there's no danger, I'm safe.
4) I generally say to myself before I do anything that I don't want to do "I get to .....", e.g. "I get to do the dishes" like it's something I really want to do and that kind of tricks my brain into making light of it... so, I also say, before I sit, "Yay, I get to sit, now!"

 

My best advice is to go loose and float, a la Claire Weekes. Over and over and over again. Do this instead of meditating if meditating is hard to tolerate. Over and over and over and the sensitization eventually decreases. I'm still working on it but I can sit and rest and relax now like I haven't been able to in years and years. You can do it, too -- maybe you, like me, need small resets over and over instead of jumping right to big resets like an hour of meditation that currently feels too threatening to your system.

 

This is so useful , wow, thank you. What was your initial tolerance level to sitting and what is it now? How long did it take you to get where you were initially to where you are now? I know everyone is different and have their own journey but taking someone’s experience as an example may help me set expectations on my own journey.

 

I have experience of meditating through a lot of inner restlessness and pain. Initially I went in with the attitude that I can obviously do this as I can run, sit, cycle etc without any symptoms. However, I have slowly realised how sitting meditation actives the fight/flight response. This was particularly noticeable at a retreat where I sat for 4+ hours per day - I got stuck in high alert for days on end and was fixating on my sitting posture.

At said retreat, I asked the teacher if I could replace the sitting meditation with walking meditation and he said that was fine. Oh the relief for my brain and nervous system - I feel far calmer when walking in comparison to sitting. So, instead of sitting for 40 minutes every morning I have replaced it with a walking meditation which I WANT to do. This seems so key in this journey is figuring out what we want and what is kind to our systems (especially for someone like myself who is willing to push and push).

Now I am slowly building up the duration of sitting still and using somatic tracking either while sitting or just before sitting to be with the anxiety and teach my brain that anxiety and discomfort aren't dangerous.
I remind myself that when I sit with friends and am enjoying myself I don't have any discomfort to challenge the beliefs that sitting itself is dangerous.

Also, relaxing is a challenge for me and is a skill to be built up when we have been stuck in fight/flight for many years. I find lying down is far more conducive to relaxing and teaching my brain that it is safe to be relaxed.

I have to be wary of doing something because it is the "right" thing to do and completely bypassing any of the fear, frustration, and resentment as it always ends up biting me in the ass.

 

Interesting, this is different to the Claire W strategy where she says sit with the discomfort in a non reactive - non fearful - way and float through the sensations. Anyways, thanks for sharing your experiences with this.

 

"Setting expectations" is exactly what (from my personal experience) one does not want to do. I'm not trying to be snotty and unhelpful in saying this and in not answering your questions above; it's simply that I have found that "setting expectations" set me up for failure or leastways 'perceived' failure (disappointment and despondency at the rate and/or level of progress) with any of the mind/body symptoms I have experienced. It creates pressure, pressure, pressure too, and in doing that, is liable to cause and/or heighten anxiety.

From 'The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook: Using the Brain's Neuroplasticity to Break the Cycle of Chronic Pain' by Vanessa M. Blackstone and Olivia Sinaiko:

"The goal is not to make the pain go away and never come back but to change the way in which you respond to pain when it arises. The sneaky truth? Learning to respond to pain in an outcome independent manner is what ultimately causes the pain to go away. Maybe not this instant but over the long term, this new way of relating to unpleasant sensations is the secret to deactivating pain pathways. On the other hand, if making pain go away is the outcome you’re set on, paradoxically, it’ll make it that much harder to actually achieve. Understandably, you want out of pain... But the tighter you hold onto that goal, the further away it will be... learning to relax your grip on the outcome is one of the best things you can do for your own recovery."

 

That’s really useful but my goal isn’t to reduce pain. The pain is only a symptom of a highly sensitised nervous system. My goal is to focus on the root cause ie to reduce the sensitivity of my fearful and frightened lizard brain. The pain will take care of itself once the brain feels safety. AI has advised me that these safety signals may help to signal safety: massage, sex, hugging, breathing slowly, slow exercise, soft music, eating yummy food mindfully, stroke a pet etc. That’s where my focus is, I don’t think focussing on building up tolerance to sit will work for me. The more you focus on that the more my brain will associate sitting as being a special activity which it is not. Sitting is sitting and so I just sit and say f*** it. My strategy is training my lizard. I now see my lizard as my pet. It was domesticated and now it’s gone feral and I just need to rehabilitate it back to safety. The lizard will reduce the pain when it finds safety so I do not need to concern myself with the pain.

 

It is different. I use similar strategies to this when the discomfort is less intense but I have got to a point where I struggle be non-reactive in sitting meditation. So it makes the most sense to have a change of the angle of approach until I can approach sitting meditation without my brain feeling intensely under threat. To be honest, I thought I was floating during the sitting meditation (I was sitting around 1-1.5 hours per day) but in reality I was in a state of mild to major resistance most of the time. This realisation opened the door to be kinder to myself and allow a shift into another form of spiritual practice that sustains me. I am gradually reintroducing sitting meditation with a lens of safety, compassion, and kindness. It is what my inner world needs at the moment.

What does your inner world need at the moment mike?

Each of us are unique in the way we approach this work. I heard recently that the TMS work is like a buffet and we can choose what we need at the time. All the techniques are working towards the same thing - teaching us to be skillfully with life's inevitable stresses without our inner lizards going on a rampage and flinging symptom after symptom at us to make us realize that something in our life is off-kilter.

 

So, how do your questions to me, i.e. "What was your initial tolerance level to sitting and what is it now? How long did it take you to get where you were initially to where you are now?" relate to what you just wrote (above)? Have you reflected and decided that, although initially 'wowed' by what I told you I do under my bullet points 1 to 4, what I have told you I am doing (under those bullet points) wouldn't actually be helpful to you? If, on the other hand, you still think what I do under those bullet points would be helpful to you, how would they likely to be helpful to you, and how might my replies to your questions be helpful to you?

With me, I never normally sit on hard chairs at home (I'm retired and at home most of the time) so when I have to sit on hard or otherwise uncomfortable chairs when I'm out of the house my brain sees it as a "special activity" and reacts to it. (I too am 'training my lizard'... in this case for it to view sitting on hard uncomfortable chairs as not being dangerous, and that it's safe to do so.)

 

I have to specify that I don't have inner restlessness.

Regarding meditation. You go within during meditation. So you are not in the world anymore, where the senses are active. Smell, hear, touch etc. Basically when you meditate, you go within. The idea is to calm your mental state. For thousands of years sages who meditated were able to be unaffected by the external factors. Like pain, suffering etc. That's the idea of meditation, to help you stay with the mind in balance. Equilibrium. Unaffected. Even if the body is in pain, you don't feel the pain like a normal person. You can rise above it. Basically, you can be happy AND in pain at the same time.

I would concentrate on my meditation practice if I were you. Think about it...you don't need the perfect external conditions to be happy, without pain etc. All you need is to go within and to manage your mental state. So it's working properly, helping you to stay even minded in any conditions.

 

I found your post really useful because those are the strategies I use too and it’s nice to have validation. What we are experiencing is really rare in the general population. AI predicts two to three million of us in a world of 8 billion. I’m referring to severe forms of TMS that could be defined as incapacitating. So to connect with someone like yourself who is validating my experiences is really supportive. The only difference as far as I can see is the strategy of building up tolerance to sitting ie cushioned seats, spending more time at home etc. I try to sit as much as possible through the pain, even on hard surfaces, saying to my brain that I don’t care, it’s just pain. I go out as much as possible and won’t let my lizard control me. However, I’m now thinking that this may not be a good strategy as the more pain felt the more the alarms ring and the more the brain thinks it’s in danger. At the end of the day, BloodMoon, we are all friends on this forum because we have no support from industry. Society has no solution to our problems so we only have each other to solutionise. Sorry if I come across as direct or critical. Please don’t take it that way. It’s not my intention. One thing that I think we all have in common is a very strong, powerful and intelligent prefrontal cortex. All of us on this forum are really smart and intelligent . I think this is why we are survivors. We are using our powerful consciousness to lead our lizards. I have outmost respect to those of you who persevere through these adversities as it isn’t easy. So please bear with me as I find my shoes. I’m new to TMS and over one year ago I had a normal life living as a normal guy. All this lizard brain stuff is new to me and I’m only beginning to understand what has happened to me. People like yourself, Sita, Jan and Cactus has been on this journey for years so please bear patient while I’m learning.

 

Interesting that you say that one can be happy and in pain at the same time. I think of pain as suffering and suffering being the opposite of happiness. However, I have met people who thrive on pain. Perhaps pain is subjective ie some thrive on it while others are debilitated by it. I find this a really interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing, Sita.

 

Mike,
Years ago I had severe panic attacks. It made me terrified to leave the house. I started meditating to calm myself. At first I could only do about 5 minutes at a time. I had this one comfortable chair I always meditated in. And I did it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. At first my mind was crazy and racing around. I wouldn’t say it was comfortable at all. Slowly over time I was able to do 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening. I would say I did that for about four months. Then after that time, I was able to increase it a little more to maybe 20 minutes per session. All I did was meditate on a peaceful scene. If my mind wandered, I just brought it back to the scene. Meanwhile, I noticed that I was getting calmer, in general— even when I wasn’t meditating. My panic started to subside a little bit. I had fewer panic attacks. Finally I increased my meditation to 30 minutes per session— but only because I kind of craved it at this point. After about a year. I could meditate an hour at a time if I was in the mood for it. I noticed it was very good at comforting me if I was in emotional distress of any kind at all. During that time my cat passed away. He had been my best friend for 15 years. I was really devastated. I would meditate an hour at a time, and it would soothe my pain of losing him. This was all about 20 years ago. Oh how I wish I had kept up my meditation practice! I think I probably wouldn’t be in the position I’m in today. I don’t know exactly how it works or what happens—-but the act of clearing your mind and sitting quietly, escaping from the world— It definitely heals your nervous system. That’s why I’m a proponent of meditation. It totally cured me of panic attacks years ago. I think it will have a cumulative effect on helping to heal my TMS, which like you, is heavily based on nervous system disregulation.

 

I think I might finally pull the trigger and order this book.

 

Rusty, I just finished this book. It’s one of the best TMS resources I’ve used so far. I loved what I’ve learned from it— and I use the techniques every day now. I noticed improvement right away when I started the book.

 

Thank you for sharing! It's in my Amazon cart, I'm doing some shopping today.

 

Thank you, Diana. I will try a gradual meditation and see whether I respond to it. Sorry about the loss of your kitten all those years ago.