Why Mindset Is Important In Rehabilitation

Imagine this. You probably have clothes against your skin; you may have a watch on or glasses. Your brain doesn’t constantly remind you that you’re wearing them because it tunes out the sensory input. It has identified the minimal threat to you from these stimuli, so has no interest in them. When it comes to long term pain, part of the problem can be your brain’s over awareness of your issue.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario where you have had real damage to your knee. At first you have swelling, pain and limited movement. Your body needs all of these things to happen in order to rest, recover and repair the damaged tissue. Six months later the tissue has repaired but you have become really aware of your knee. Before your knee damage, you never thought about your knee. You’d move freely, play sport, go for long walks, but now it is always in the back of your mind. Your brain has learned your knee is a problem that needs to be solved or your chances of survival will decrease.

What started as a necessity in order to minimalise the pain you were feeling and allow the soft tissue to heal, has now become your norm. You have pain in your knee now but it is different than before. Things are tight and uncomfortable, even though the tissue from the original injury has healed. Through being over protective, your nervous system has manufactured an environment where certain tendons and ligaments have limited freedom of motion to protect something that no longer needs protecting.

You’ve stopped playing your favourite sport, only go upstairs one step at a time, your friends and family have noticed you walk entirely different to how you used to in an attempt to protect your knee.

What Action Do You Need To Take?

I often say to people who I work with that we need you to be in a place where you forget you have a knee, back, elbow or wherever you feel pain. Before the pain arrived you’d have never thought about your movements in that region in such depth; now it might be all you think about.

How we do this is by encouraging a variety of specific and holistic motions in different ranges with our focus on the movements being fluid, stable and joyful. Joyful? That is correct! Your brain needs to forget about the painful region. It needs the negative stimulus to be replaced with positive and I have a whole host of ways to do this.

Does This Work For All Pain?

This is just one example of how are nervous system works in relation to pain. If you have snapped your ACL, have nerve impingement, or organ referral issues then thinking happy thoughts whilst moving will not be enough. A positive mindset in all scenarios will always go far further than a negative one that being said.

Is The Pain Real?

All pain is real. All pain is in your head. If someone tells you your pain is in your head, they’re 100% correct. If they say it in a way that makes it sound as though you’re making it up, they’re 100% incorrect. Always remember pain is entirely subjective and unique to you, that pain may be part of your psychology and physiology but that doesn’t make it any less real than any other pain.

3 Tips For Improving Your Relationship To Pain & Rehabilitation

1. You will have to deal with a certain amount of discomfort in order to challenge your nervous system to progress and adapt but NEVER do anything that increases your pain.
2. Always move slowly alongside relaxing breathing techniques.
3. When doing rehab exercises think of anything positive, your brain needs to associate the area of pain with positive feedback not negative.