"Pain Care Yoga" effectively relieve pain?

The secret of pain! Can “Pain Care Yoga” effectively relieve pain?

Do you suffer from chronic pain?
Is this chronic pain frustrating to you?
Or are you a health care practitioner who wants to provide better assistance to patients?

The first step is to “understand pain”!

Next, you will be able to understand pain, the relationship between pain and the nervous system, the operation of nerve cells, etc., and disassemble the operation step by step, and then find useful practice methods to reduce pain and even return to normal.

Please be sure to understand pain first, and then come with me to experience Pain Care Yoga for 10 minutes. After repeated practice, you can deeply feel the effects of pain care yoga on your body.

Me and Pain Care Yoga

I came into contact with Pain Care Yoga because after participating in teacher Cai Shijie’s healing yoga, I had a very different feeling about yoga. It was so soothing and I developed a sense of trust in the teacher.

Then Teacher Cai promoted a Pain Care Yoga. Yoga Teacher Training In Rishikesh taught by Neil Pearson. I was interested in this subject and thought it could help my students. Since Teacher Cai recommended it, I signed up immediately.

Every teacher training course is very expensive, and this time is no exception, but it is well worth the money. The content of the course is mainly aimed at people with pain, discussing pain theory, and practicing Yoga exercises specially designed for people with pain. I can observe

experiences more closely. three people from the left in the first row are me^ ^

The teacher explained the mechanism of pain in simple and easy-to-understand terms. After understanding pain, I clearly understood that it can really help people with pain recover. This can help many people solve their pain problems. I am completely touched!

The following content is mainly based on the key points compiled from the book “Understanding Pain and Living a Happy Life Again” by Neil Pearson. If you want to have a clearer understanding, you can buy his book.

If you are a clinical professional or someone suffering from chronic pain, I really recommend you to take the “Pain Care YogaTeacher Training” class. You will definitely gain a lot!

purpose of Pain Care Yoga

Pain Care Yoga is to protect you, it is a protective mechanism of the body.

When your body is in danger or there is potential danger, use pain to warn you to avoid the danger. If it continues, it will cause harm, or try to stop using this part of the body, so that it can heal.

However, the degree of Pain Care Yoga does not match the severity. For example, a small wound caused by a paper cut is very painful.

pain and nervous system

The nervous system mainly includes the brain , spinal cord cord and nerves , as well as the autonomic nervous system . When you are injured, every part of your nervous system reacts.

Main work of nervous system

Nerves: Sense things inside and outside the body

Spine: Send information to the brain for analysis

Brain : Determines what actions need to be taken, the brain generates actions, thoughts and reactions

Autonomic nervous system: Unconscious autonomic responses, such as breathing

Image source: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH

nerve function

Sense things inside and outside the body
Send sensory information to spine
Transmits action signals from the brain and spinal cord to muscles and other body tissues
Nerves are composed of many nerve cells, or neurons (the operation of nerve cells will be explained more fully below).
The skin has more endings than other tissues in the body, so more is sensed of what is on the skin than on the tissue beneath it.

function of spine

Upward transmission: sending messages upward to the brain
Downward transmission: sending action signals downward from the brain
Controlling reflections can determine whether the signal is blocked or the intensity is adjusted

Note: The reflex function is that the spine can immediately send information back to the body, which means that the brain can make the body take action before it recognizes what has happened.

brain functions

Analyze incoming messages
Decide what to do based on information, generate actions and thoughts

The brain works either by the brain itself or by the priorities you decide are important.

For example, when your brain is busy with other important things and your thumb is hit by a hammer, fewer signals are transmitted to the brain, so the brain provides less protective responses. Based on the principle of priority, you feel less Pain Care Yoga.

functions of the autonomic nervous system

Show body autonomic response

Autonomic responses of the nervous system are usually involuntary, such as digestion, heart rate, breathing rate and depth, sweating, etc. Science shows that through learning it is possible to exercise some voluntary control over most automatic functions.

When pain persists:

Many autonomic reactions of the nervous system will be involved
The spine changes the messages it sends to the brain
The brain determines what you will feel and how your body will react.

The more you understand the connections in your nervous system, the better you will know how to recover (you will understand more as you read on).

The operation of nerve cells

Nerve cells are also called neurons. Neurons are very small but can be very long and transmit signals very quickly.

It is composed of receptors, long axons and bulbous terminals. The receptors are replaced every few days.

The sensory receptors of different neurons in the body are stimulated only by certain messages, and each sensory receptor can usually only detect one type of message.

For example, neurons in the eyes have sensory receptors that detect light; sensory receptors on taste buds detect chemicals.

The neurons of the pain alarm system have three different sensory receptors:

External forces on the tissue, such as pressure, stretch
chemical irritants
extreme heat and cold

All three types of sensory receptors detect potential danger. These “danger” neurons, known as danger receptors, send danger messages and release dangerous chemicals.

Dangerous neurons often have high thresholds (ie, boundary values) that do not respond to slight external forces, small temperature changes, or small amounts of chemicals.

When tissue damage occurs, cells release chemicals that are detected by sensory receptors.

When enough sensory receptors open, the danger neurons send messages to the other end, all the way to the brain.

Dangerous chemicals are called neurotransmitters, and there are many different neurotransmitters in the nervous system:

Some fire other neurons
Some may have inhibitory effects
Some transmitters are more powerful than others

How the spinal cord and brain interpret signals

Spinal Cord : There is an opportunity to interrupt certain signals to the brain to ensure that the brain is receiving the messages that are deemed truly important. If the neurons in the spine have past experience information, it will increase or decrease the signal strength.
Brain : There is also an increase or decrease in signal strength or blocking of signals from the spinal cord.

What affects whether a danger signal fires a spinal neuron or a brain neuron is the firing state of that neuron before it gets a new signal. And the firing state of neurons is constantly changing.

Your system usually protects you very well, and usually the neurons in the pain alarm system are not easily fired; they have a very high firing threshold.

But when a neuron is already active, it is in a highly excited state, making it easy to be excited and send a signal to the other end.

For example, when you get a sunburn, your skin’s nervous system is activated and even warm water can make your skin feel like it’s on fire.

Understanding how this system works when you experience pain under normal circumstances will help you better recover (you will understand more and more as you read later).

What’s happening in the brain and body when you feel pain

The brain’s job is to make an informed decision about what’s going on in your body. It analyzes all incoming information and combines it with your knowledge and experience to determine what is happening and whether you need to be aware of it.

When the brain’s message determines that there is no real danger, you will not feel pain, and when the brain determines that the danger is greater, you will feel more pain.

Some things happen automatically in your body, such as digestion, breathing, blood flow, detoxification of the liver and kidneys, etc. The autonomic nervous system makes decisions for you before you are conscious, and the pain system also works automatically.

You can have some influence over these autonomic responses, and the same goes for Pain Care Yoga.

When you feel pain, your body may engage in fight/flight/freeze:

Increased breathing and heart rate
skin becomes pale or flushed
Sweating on the skin
Muscle tightness or weakness
Pupil dilation and heightened senses
dizzy
You will stay away from things that cause pain
You look for the cause of the pain
making sounds or emotions in response to pain

…and wait for the reaction to occur.

When pain is felt, hundreds of areas in the brain activate and every system in the body responds, all with the single goal of “protecting you.”

When you feel the same pain many times, the pain changes:

The same pain is felt with lower intensity multiple times. This is the result of adaptation of the nervous system. The system becomes less responsive and the pain decreases.
On the contrary, by recurring as if the problem is dangerous, the system will become more and more sensitive and protective of you, making the pain worse, leading to a vicious cycle.

These two responses illustrate an important point: the pain alarm system is not static.

If the fight/flight/freeze response persists and remains activated, the pain alarm system will remain activated, increasing your Pain Care Yoga sensation.

Although this reaction is typically automatic, you can learn some control over it. This will help break the vicious cycle of pain and achieve Pain Care Yoga relief. (The control method will be explained later).

Pain is not an exact guide

Pain False Belief : The more we injure our bodies, the more pain we will feel.

Pain is not an accurate indicator of what is happening in the body

Have you ever felt pain in a certain part of your body, but nothing was happening there? Two common causes: transfer pain and Pain Care Yoga empathy.

1. Transfer pain

When pain occurs in an area where there is no tissue problem, it is called metastatic pain, usually because the signal is coming from a certain area of the body, but the nervous system cannot pinpoint its source.

For example, eating something very cold can cause a brain freeze.

This is because the soft palate behind the The roof of the mouth detects something very cold and sends a message to the brain. The brain decides that you need to be protected. However, the roof of the mouth does not feel much pain. This is because the brain does not have a good map of the inside of the body. It can only tell you roughly where the signal is coming from.

But the brain has a great map of the skin, and touch can be a precise indicator of where and what’s going on in your skin.

This suggests that the pain alarm system works differently than touch, and that where people typically feel pain does not accurately indicate where tissue problems are occurring in the body.

2. Pain Empathy

Pain empathy is the pain I feel when I see someone else being hurt or expressing pain. Scientists call the neurons behind this experience mirror neurons . Allow your nervous system to react to what you are seeing, hearing, or relating to as if it were actually happening to you.

One of the things that states that pain is not an accurate indicator of what is going on in your body.

pain is like vision

Which side of this cube is closer to you?

This picture excites the neurons in your eyes and sends a message to your brain, which instantly decides which way you will look at the picture.

This is done without any awareness, it is a condition where the nervous system operates automatically.

Now try the new fraction. Are there any other ways you can look at the cube? Your brain decides to see the cube one way, but you can decide to see it another way.

Explain that the nervous system alone can respond to incoming signals, and that even if the nervous system responds in a specific way, you have the power to change it.

The danger signal has a higher priority than the visual signal of the cube, indicating that changing how the nervous system perceives danger signals is difficult, but not impossible.

Pain feels like thirst

When our body is dehydrated, a “low blood volume” signal is sent to the brain. The blood volume is too low. The brain detects the message and creates a feeling of thirst.

When you feel thirsty and drink a large glass of water, you won’t feel thirsty immediately, but it takes ten to fifteen minutes for the water in the stomach to enter the blood system. This is because you have already made the necessary response to the problem and your brain no longer pays attention to the signal.

Another example, you take a painkiller that you believe will help, and you feel the pain begin to subside even before it reaches your bloodstream.

If you don’t receive the treatment you think you need, your system may become more aware of danger signs, exacerbating your pain.

When thirsty, we might expect our nervous system to interpret the signal correctly, but we often pay less attention to it and drink something that makes us more dehydrated. And sometimes one of the main causes of headaches is dehydration, but when you have a headache, you usually don’t drink water .

Your body’s vital alarm systems don’t always give your body the right messages, and the same goes for Pain Care Yoga.

The information your nervous system provides you is based on past experience rather than facts. The experiences we have and the sensations we feel are influenced by everything, and so is pain.

A new understanding of pain is one of the most important things for anyone working to restore movement and life to health.

when pain persists

When pain persists, there are two issues to deal with:

The problem that originally caused the pain
oversensitive nervous system

Changes in neurons in the body

Neuron sensory receptors normally have high thresholds and require sufficient stimulation for them to send danger signals to the spinal cord. When these neurons continue to send danger signals, the threshold (limit value) will begin to decrease.

The more the danger neuron fires up, the more it fires. After these neurons normally send out a signal, there is a delay before they can send out the next signal, but continued pain shortens the delay, allowing the dangerous neurons to send out more signals.

Dangerous neurons release chemicals into the tissue, starting at the neuron’s sensory receptors, causing inflammation. Inflammation is a protective system of the body. These chemicals can produce swelling in the tissue even long after the tissue has healed.

Ridge changes with neurons

The longer the pain persists, the more excitable the spinal neurons become and begin to produce more sensory receptors, which can detect more dangerous chemicals and stimulate them more easily to send signals to the brain.

This means that fewer physical signals are needed to cause you to feel pain.

Neurons in the spine that transmit danger signals misinterpret normally normal sensations of touch, stretch, and movement as danger signals. You will feel pain whenever you touch the skin of the injured area or stretch uninjured tissue in the injured area.

Changes in brain neurons

As pain persists, the map of the injured part of the body becomes enlarged. For example, if you stub your toe, the injured area will become larger and larger, sometimes accompanied by swelling.

When the map changes, it also affects the muscles’ ability to contract and relax. For example, if you have shoulder pain, you may find that you cannot lift your arm smoothly.

When pain persists, the deep stabilizing muscles often don’t work enough or don’t activate at the right time, leaving too many superficial muscles. The nervous system changes and the muscle groups learn a new, but unhelpful, response pattern.

For example, when you try to move, you may feel that your joints are stuck, your muscles will spasm, or you may feel pain. This is the brain sending wrong signals. The problem is with the nervous system, not the tissue.

As pain persists, the brain begins to change the chemicals it produces and releases. Some chemicals are hormones that stimulate the body’s fight/flight/freeze response.

These reactions not only produce feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, and depression, but also feed back into the Pain Care Yoga system, increasing their sensitivity.

Ongoing pain alters the sensory receptors of dangerous neurons, making them sensitive to epinephrine. When stress occurs, the adrenaline released by the body stimulates danger neurons to send more danger signals to the brain.

The longer you feel pain, the more your nervous system triggers the pain tune. Even without new signals from the body, something can trigger pain.

It’s like listening to the same song day after day. Each note of the song becomes more and more familiar, and the same song automatically comes to mind unintentionally.

For example, why does a patient who has been hit by a car feel pain when he sees a specific car model? Or the patient feels pain every time he bends forward, so when the physical therapist tells him to retest the amplitude of the forward bend, the Pain Care Yoga intensifies.

As pain persists, your nervous system gets better at sending out danger signals and better at paying attention to them.

But please remember!

Whatever the neural system learns can change, no matter how long it takes
Anything learned by the nervous system can be changed and can be restored
Neurons can become less sensitive and less attentive
You can stop misinterpreting normal feelings as danger signals
Sensory receptors can return to their original state
The body’s map in the brain can return to its normal state
The muscular system can restore its original coordinated movements

The key is to find the right changes and practice them over and over again to reduce the sensitivity and protective responses of the nervous system.

Even if we cannot change the underlying tissue problem, we can still effectively reduce the oversensitivity of the nervous system.

Changes in the Nervous System and Pain

It is possible to make the nervous system change the way you want it to. Nerves are incredibly adaptable cells that can change the way they function much faster than muscle cells.

Neurons can be changed by almost anything, including how they stretch, our beliefs, our emotions, etc., so we have considerable ability to change what neurons do.

Through practice and the right intervention, you will learn specific techniques to change your neurons, nervous system, and body. These changes will lead to less pain, better mobility, and an improved quality of life.

Change sensory receptors

When pain persists, your body thinks you need more protection and starts creating new, more sensitive sensory receptors.

The secretion of adrenaline usually indicates that something threatening has happened or that something is causing you stress, so when you need more protection, your body will build more adrenaline receptors to make sure you know .

Every sensory receptor in the body is replaced every three or four days, but not all at the same time. About a thousand sensory receptors are replaced every second.

Our bodies have trillions of sensory receptors. As your nervous system becomes calmer and calmer, your body can replace the original highly sensitive sensory receptors with normal sensory receptors (low sensitivity, high excitation limit).

The more time you give yourself to stay in a calmer state, and the more patience you have, the pain will significantly change over time .

Affects brain chemicals

Endorphins are the most powerful chemicals for improving pain. They are mostly produced by neurons and can also be produced by other cells in the body. They have stronger analgesic effects than morphine.

Endorphins stop or block danger signals in the brain or spinal cord. One endorphin molecule can block approximately 50 danger signals. Because fewer danger signals are sent to the brain, you feel less pain.

Endorphins do pleasant things in you, such as boosting your mood, allowing you to move more freely and having more joy in your life. They are very effective techniques that can help you change your Pain Care Yoga and improve your quality of life.

Find a way to make yourself happier and release endorphins through sufficient practice. For example, learn to have better control over your emotions, deliberately let yourself laugh, smile or exercise, and you can change the pain.

Shift focus on pain

Most people usually avoid, suppress or ignore pain, which will make the nervous system pay more attention to it. For example, if you are asked not to think about a pink elephant next to you, it will be difficult for you not to think of this image.

Focusing on Pain Care Yoga, or noticing it without reacting to it, not only modifies your attention, it also helps change the nervous system and modifies your body’s response to the sensation.

When you feel pain, there are hundreds of areas in the brain that respond, and all the protective response areas and all the other areas feed back and increase attention to the pain, thus producing more pain.

We can learn how to control these physiological responses, and when we do, our anxiety decreases.

With practice, you experience pain as you control other responses and protective responses in your nervous system. If fewer areas of the brain respond to pain, this allows less positive feedback to enter the system. Then your pain experience will decrease.

Learn to deliberately lower your attention to the painful area and focus more on other things when the body is moving, and reduce the pain by changing the nervous system’s attention to the painful area.

You can change the brain’s focus on pain, and you can influence the type of attention the brain gives.

For example, close your eyes and choose to listen to your own breathing, take a few breaths, and listen to see what the sound of your breathing sounds like. Now shift your auditory focus to the birdsong outside the window, or other sounds around the room. Now stay focused on the sound of your breathing while also paying attention to other sounds in your body. You can do the same for pain.

Altering the nervous system’s interpretation of danger signals

How to practice : Find something that will increase your Pain Care Yoga, but that you know is not actually dangerous to your body.

Purpose: It can change how dangerous your brain considers your activities. Teach the nervous system that this is not actually dangerous. With enough practice, the nervous system will learn that this activity is not really dangerous.

Frequency of time: You will need to practice regularly, perhaps once an hour for several days or weeks, before changes occur.

The autonomic response of the nervous system has begun to produce changes in your nervous system. Take advantage of the adaptability of the nervous system and use techniques to make positive changes in the nervous system and live a good life again.

What situations worsen your Pain Care Yoga?

Pain Care Yoga is caused by more factors:

Danger neurons can be activated by physical forces, chemicals and extreme temperatures
As neurons continue to send danger signals, they become more likely to fire

The next exercise, hopefully with the help of a therapist, is to identify the factors that trigger your pain:

Make a list of movements or positions that will reduce your pain
List the movements or positions that always worsen your Pain Care Yoga
Make a list of things that reduce your pain, such as laughing, doing things you enjoy, etc.
Make a list of things that always make your pain worse, such as being near where you were injured, talking to people who upset you, etc.
Make a list of uncontrollable changes you have noticed in yourself, such as breathing patterns, sleep, mood, etc.

Once you begin to identify your triggers, you can begin to work on the changes you can do to affect each of them, which will lead to improvements in pain or reduced activity.

For example, if you notice that holding your breath every time you are nervous makes your pain worse, so holding your breath triggers your pain, and you can practice being aware of it and adjusting to it.

Since everything affects pain, there are many ways to reduce it, and even small regulatory changes in the body , breathing, thoughts, and emotions can lead to a reduced response of protective systems.

While the things that guilt you into causing pain may be the most difficult to change, start with goals that are more manageable and achievable. Once you learn how to deal with the less troublesome triggers, use your new skills to deal with the more difficult ones.

Reset your body

Pre-injury : Your pain alarm system will sound an alarm when you are close to damaging tissue in normal/less than persistent pain conditions.

Chronic Pain: If you exercise too hard, pain can flare up even without further tissue damage.

Many people with ongoing pain have at one time or another become frustrated with the pain and decided to skip the pain, only to have the pain flare up and push them back to square one at a time. Stronger immunity than pain won’t help.

Although it does not damage the tissue, it puts more tension on the nervous system and teaches the nervous system that you need to be protected from the movement.

As your alarm system becomes more and more sensitive, your alarm system will learn that you don’t listen, so it will yell at you louder.

The correct way to restore motion:

Challenge your alarm

The baseline for performing movements, the baseline is the edge, the just-right-point, just-where-you-move-enough-but-not-too-much, which is where the alarm bells go off in chronic pain.

You’ll know you’ve reached baseline when you feel an increase in pain and you know the movement is not dangerous to your tissues and you can do it in a smooth, relaxing manner.

You need to challenge your alarm so that the alarm system can respond slightly, and then when you stop the activity, the alarm system will calm down for a short period of time, making the alarm system less sensitive and teaching your nervous system to stop acting. React as if there is danger.

Every time you move in a way that challenges the alarm but doesn’t set off the bell, the baseline moves a little bit up or to the right. Over time, the alarm system becomes less sensitive, allowing you to move more without worsening of Pain Care Yoga.

Ask “Is this really dangerous?”

When your nervous system tells you that this small movement is dangerous, you can ask yourself “Is this really dangerous?” If you know that it is not dangerous, then teach your nervous system that it is not dangerous.

It’s not about telling yourself that it doesn’t hurt, it’s about ignoring or suppressing the pain. You can tell yourself, “I feel pain, but I’m okay.” You can learn whatever you practice with your nerves.

Tips for finding the right exercise

Start small and often
Move in new ways instead of the same way you have been doing for years or months
Choose sports that are fun or bring you joy
Only do as much as possible as long as you can maintain calm breathing
Before you try to challenge your pain alarm, find a quiet and calm place to practice relaxing breathing
Before trying to exercise, mentally imagine doing it without pain.
Practice moving with a relaxed facial expression, relaxed posture, relaxed tongue, and a calm mind
Before and after exercise, take some time to relax and calm your breathing

Pain Care Yoga Exercises

Please be sure to understand pain first, and then come with me to experience Pain Care Yoga for 10 minutes. After repeated practice, you can deeply feel the effects ofPain Care Yoga on your body.

You have to believe that you have the ability to change your nervous system and pain, and slowly reset your body. Please be more patient with yourself, and your body will give you good feedback!

in conclusion

If you are in chronic pain, don’t give up on improving your pain. Practice is a huge key to success. Just be persistent, patient and caring with yourself and you can overcome the pain and live well again.

If you are a health care professional, I hope this article has given you some inspiration, and finally, thank you! Because of you, people with chronic pain can have better assistance in pain management and improve their quality of life.

I have completed Neil Pearson’s “Pain Care Yoga Teacher Training” and “Understanding Pain Care Yoga and Re-living Life” books, which made me understand the science and management of pain. I thought that it can help many people and bring infinite benefits. Very moving, highly recommended to you!