Living with ongoing pain can be very distressing as it can impact significantly on both your physical, mental, social and family life
What can I do to improve how I feel, move, and function?
- Learn about your pain
The first thing is to learn more about why your body is producing these sensations
There are many helpful websites and resources that can help you learn more about how pain works and some strategies that can help manage it.
A good starting point would include these resources:
“Tame the Beast- It’s time to rethink persistent pain”:
A short animated video to help you to understand your pain
Tame The Beast — It’s time to rethink persistent pain
Pain as an alarm system:
One way to understand pain is to think of the body as having a built in alarm system such as outlined here:
Persistent pain explained in 3 minutes
Pain Revolution:– Open access modules on learning more about your pain and being proactive in managing it: https://www.painrevolution.org/factsheets
The goal of this article was to provide some useful resources on learning about your pain as it is the first key step to improving function and making life more enjoyable again.
However, while this article won’t go into detail about the following the most useful way to improve day to day function and stop persistent pain controlling your life is a combination of the following:
- Learn about your pain (check out the above resources)
- Set some tangible functional goals eg: a daily walk, doing grocery shopping without help, etc
- Make movement part of your plan: Movement is very helpful for treating persistent pain. You can also refer to your coach, physiotherapist, or exercise physiologist who can help get you moving again
- Have a team of health professionals to help you: There is a range of strategies and it can be helpful to talk to a professional to improve your day-to-day function.
If you ever have any questions feel free to reach out we are here to help
