Sarah Warren - The Pain Relief Secret: How to Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain

Copyright 2019 by Sarah Warren.

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Contents

Medical Disclaimer

This book is not intended to be a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in all health matters, particularly with respect to symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

As we grow older, our bodiesand our livesshould continue to improve, right up until the very end. I believe that all of us, in our hearts, feel that this is how life really should be lived.

Dr. Thomas Hanna
Founder, Clinical Somatic Education

Why Youre in Pain

We live in a time of incredible advancement in medical technology. Doctors give people new hips when their old ones wear out, new arteries to replace clogged ones, and drugs to manage almost any condition. Scientists can grow new body parts in labs, and doctors routinely use robots to perform surgeries on patients who may be thousands of miles away. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction.

These feats would have been impossible and practically unimaginable just a few centuries ago. Back then, people were more concerned with eliminating the viral and bacterial infections that ran rampant through populations, killing thousands of people in a single outbreak. The practice of vaccination, widely considered to be the greatest accomplishment of modern medicine thus far, has turned these epidemics into distant memories for much of the world.

The near elimination of external threats to human health has extended life expectancies in many countries, but its also opened the door for new threats to quality of life. In the Western world, our successful dominance over our environment has brought with it a sedentary lifestyle, man-made toxins, nutritionally deficient and chemically enhanced food, and new kinds of stress that we are ill-equipped to handle.

As a result, most of us live relatively long lives during which we encounter a myriad of internal threats. Heart disease, high blood pressure, mental illness, ulcers, cancer, autoimmune disorders, obesity, diabetes, chronic pain, and physical degeneration have become the norm. We accept and even assume that well experience oneif not severalof these conditions by the time we reach middle age.

Until very recently, the approach of treating an ailment from the outside inwith antibiotics, vaccination, or surgerywas entirely appropriate, given that most threats to peoples health came from outside their bodies. But while Western medicine works miracles on a daily basis, it hasnt successfully addressed some of the internal threats people face today. Far too many people suffer from chronic pain, loss of mobility, and musculoskeletal degeneration. Science has shown that these debilitating problems can be prevented and even reversed, but very few people get the proper help and treatment they need.

To make things worse, pharmaceutical companies create drugs that keep chronic lifestyle-related conditions and chronic pain effectively under control. These drugs give you the illusion that your conditions are being cured, when in reality they do nothing to address the underlying causes.

Like so many people today, your reliance on doctors to treat you with medicine and surgery keeps you from realizing that you have a tremendous amount of control over your own health. This mental block is exceedingly evident when it comes to muscle and joint pain and degeneration.

The myth that your body will inevitably break down and that you must experience pain as you age is so ingrained that youve probably never stopped to wonder why this breakdown occurs and if it might be avoidable. As a result, the scientific research around pain is devoted to to developing new drugs that simply manage pain conditions and new surgical techniques that fix worn-out joints instead of investigating the underlying causes of physical decline.

While there are many causes of chronic pain, including cancer, autoimmune conditions, and neuropathy, most musculoskeletal pain and degeneration occurs because of the way that you habitually use your body. The way you sit, stand, and move makes your muscles chronically tight and sore, compresses your joints and nerves, and puts stress on your bones, often to the point of causing significant pain and damage to the structure of your body.

Throughout your life, you develop unique ways of standing and moving. Most animals come out of the womb already knowing how to movepicture the fawn who awkwardly stands up less than an hour after being born and is soon trotting aroundbut humans require at least a year of motor learning to reach the same degree of proficiency. And while most animals complete their motor learning process by the time theyre a few years old, you continue to learn new motor skills and habits throughout your life.

You develop muscular patterns based on a vast array of factors. Your physical and emotional environment, your reactions to stress, your personality, the injuries you sustain, the sports you play, and any physical training you engage in all contribute to your habitual posture and movement. Like all humans, your incredible capacity to learn sets you apart from other animals and makes it inevitable that you will acquire a pattern of muscular habits that is entirely unique. No other human being on the planet moves quite like you.

Youre probably familiar with this learning process: Its the way you develop muscle memory. When you repeat a movement like swinging a golf club, the neurons involved in controlling that movement develop increasingly stronger connections. Existing synapses begin to fire more efficiently, and new synapses are formed. As a result, your golf swing becomes more automatic, reliable, and forceful the more often you practice.

Despite what the term implies, muscles have no memory of their own. Theyre controlled by your nervous system, which likes to be as efficient as possible because making fast decisions helps you survive. When your nervous system notices that you keep repeating the same movement or posture, it begins to make that movement or posture automatic. As the muscular pattern becomes more deeply learned, the control and memory of the pattern shifts to different areas of your brain. This process allows the parts of your brain responsible for making voluntary decisions to focus on new things that require conscious attention.

The process of acquiring muscle memory is not limited to athletes, nor is it limited to learning complex movement patterns like swinging a golf club. The same learning process goes on all the time within your nervous system every day of your entire life, even if you sit at a desk all day and then sit on a couch watching TV at night.

Some people choose to work with their muscle memory, actively training and retraining certain muscular patterns in pursuit of a goal like winning an Olympic medal, performing heart surgery, or typing faster. But thats not the norm: Like most people, youre probably unaware that that youre engaged in a constant process of subconsciously reinforcing old movement patterns and learning new ones.