Читать книгу Why It Hurts - Dr. Aneesh Singla - Страница 20

Apply a methodical approach to managing your pain. When science fails to give you a complete explanation for a phenomenon, rely on observation. After repeated observation, take what you see and construct a model. With the help of your doctor, you can take that model and test it to see if it holds true in practice. Together, you can study the results of your trials and use statistics to see if there truly is an effect and, if so, how powerful it is.

As Eckhart Tolle suggests in A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose, say to yourself, “Here is the pain, and here are my thoughts around it.” You start to put the pain in perspective.

I would encourage you to find the sources of pain in your own life experiences and learn from them. Reversing the pain can facilitate this process. We know that withdrawing reflexively from a painful situation may confer a survival advantage and is an automatic reaction. According to Isaac Newton, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In a way, pain is a force of nature, causing you to reflexively back away from a bad stimulus in proportion to the size of that stimulus, keeping you safe. Taking this same reflex and using it to consciously channel painful experiences into something meaningful will, over time, produce an automatic reaction. This feat will require some adjustments in how you consciously (and perhaps subconsciously) process pain, but the resulting learned mechanism will contribute heavily to your survival as a human being.

For example, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears are a common sports injury. The pain from an ACL injury alerts the athlete to a problem. Surgical repair is performed. Knee rehabilitation occurs post-operatively. The knee heals.

Pain is an important part of every step of this healing process. The knee hurts and reminds us we can’t go running or resume sports right away. Much like the pain of a healing ulceration or laceration, pain reminds us not to touch the area; if we get close, it hurts, and we back off. Pain protects you from the risk of an infection or increased scarring in this case. Pain is a helpful reminder not to push ourselves too early while an injury is still healing, or we can potentially worsen it or set ourselves back.