Won Body Won Life, Ep 5: Life-changing Mindset Hacks to Eliminate Chronic Pain

In this episode, I'll be covering 3 mindset hacks and tips to take full control of chronic pain in your life. Mind and body are connected; so we can't just focus on movement or exercises for relief. As much as I'd like to support that notion, start with the right mindset, and it'll reflect on the actions you take to become resilient and pain-free again.

Scroll down for show transcript.

Ep 5 Transcript

Welcome to the Won Body Won Life podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, lifestyle physical therapist.

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Today, I'll be talking about three mindset hacks to eliminate chronic pain.

Everybody knows that I am a huge fan of getting more people to strength train and to mobilize their body. And that is taking a very physical approach that is the exercise portion. But I also believe that you can't separate mind and body.

So today we'll be talking all about different mindset hacks, very practical strategies that you can use, especially if you're a person that has had or has dealt with chronic pain or you've had a surgery or some sort of injury that is hard to recover from.

So the first thing I want to talk to you about the first step is: looking forward and not looking back. And I think there are too many people in life, that when they have chronic pain, they're always looking back at their past experiences, their past experiences could be many different things.

So it could be that they repeatedly hurt their lower back multiple times. And every time they decide to pick up something, whether it's their child or pick up a box off the floor, they always anticipating that movement pattern, they're always becoming fearful before they even do it. And that often leads to a limited quality of life.

But also if you think about there's something called a window of function. And if you look at my baby, or you look at a six-year-old child that just running around the playground, and they're jumping off at the play structures from 20 feet up with no fear and no regards. Those type of people oftentimes have a very large window of function. That means that they are able to do whatever they choose from a functional or movement standpoint.

Now as we get older, there are many people that often will either sprained their ankle, they'll injure themselves, they'll do a lot of different things. And when that happens, that temporarily decreases their window function. So for example, if I sprained my ankle in playing sports, then I'll generally have to take a few weeks off in order to recover from that. And that makes sense because we need to go through our stages of remodeling the tissues, healing from it, it goes through an inflammatory phase, and then eventually, we get back to walking, then running, and eventually, maybe get back to sport.

However, if we repeatedly hurt ourselves, we start to have more alarms go off. And these alarms, it's like, essentially you think about a house. And if that house gets robbed, you might set up an alarm system, you might set up some cameras in the front of your house, to prevent yourself from getting robbed. But then all of a sudden, now they're sneaking in through the back door, they're coming in from a helicopter, for example. And now you're on high alert all the time.

So at the same thing goes that if we repeatedly heard ourselves or repeatedly have negative experiences, that will lead to us having more alarm systems go off. And therefore what happens is our window of function, it dramatically gets smaller. So there is a few subsets of people that after an injury, they'll immediately just recover, they have a very, very strong mindset around things.

Sometimes when we repeatedly hurt ourselves, or we're a person that doesn't tolerate pain very well, there could be a lot of different nuance, psychosocial factors that play into this. That's what happens to our window function is that once we hurt ourselves, that window function becomes a lot smaller, and we start to anticipate pain, we start to anticipate different things that might cause a threat to our body.

But what happens now is that the number one tip that I want to start you off with is looking forward and not looking backwards. If we continuously look backwards, then essentially it's like an anvil that's dragging a ship, a ship trying to move forward to their final destination, but you have this super large anvil that's basically slowing you down or stopping you right in your truck. So the analogy I like to use with a lot of my clients is when you are driving, let's say you're driving on the freeway, when you're usually driving, you usually have it on drive, your foot is on the gas pedal, and your hands are on the steering wheel.

So when you're looking forward on a freeway driving about 60 to 70 miles an hour. That's pretty fast. And I always think that if I want to not get into an accident, I need to keep looking forward. If you're looking backwards, let's say you're looking in the mirror, the mirror on the right-hand side, and you're constantly turning your head. And you're constantly looking backwards at the cars that you just passed, at the buildings that you just passed, would that make sense to keep looking backwards, when there's traffic ahead of you. If there's a traffic jam, you definitely don't want to keep looking backwards 80% of the time, because if you look backwards, that's going to get you into a car accident going forward.

If we're looking forward 90% of the time, then that's going to prevent an accident from happening. If you look forward, then you could see all the beautiful views and all the different things that are in front of you, instead of constantly looking backwards, because if we look backwards, more often than that's going to get us into an accident soon in the near future. Hopefully, that analogy makes sense that in life, especially with chronic pain, you don't want to keep looking back at your past experiences, you don't want to keep looking back at the clinicians or the practitioners that you had a horrible experience with, you don't want to keep looking backwards at the times that you hurt yourself.

And now your body is stuck in a fight or flight. And your body is so stiff, and it anticipates moving, and you're always being fearful of the next thing that's going to happen to you. So what I like to do is give people something, a strategy to actually use on a weekly basis. And feel free to write this down and continue to use this in your own life. And it's called Look Forward, Look Back, Start, Stop, Continue. And this is something that I actually add into my schedule into my calendar, every single Sunday, I evaluate my week and how it went every single week.

And what I do is I write it down either on a piece of paper or on a virtual calendar, you can use whatever you choose. And what you do is fill in the dots. So looking forward, is that what sort of events or what sort of things do I have looking forward, and then you temporarily look backward and be like, hey, now I want to see what I've done in the past. And I want to move forward from that.

So it could be something as simple as, okay, looking forward, I have a wedding to prepare for I have a certain sporting event or a tournament to attend. And then looking backwards, you look back at, hey, well, there are certain things that I could change. So now you fill in the dots in terms of saying start, stop, continue.

So you look back at the week that you just had. And then you say to yourself, I need to make change. So ‘I'm going to start doing this, this, and this, I'm going to start doing one, two, and three, I'm going to start getting to sleep on time, I'm going to start working out consistently. And now I'm going to start meal prepping’. And that's just purely an example of something I would actually fill in to this system, which is look forward, look backwards, start stop continue.

Something that you want to start with is, is those three things, so three to four things that will inch the needle forward with your health and to help you get rid of pain, for example, then you say to yourself, stop.

So you fill in the dots with Stop saying, ‘I'm going to stop telling myself that I need to protect my body, I'm going to start trusting my body, I'm going to stop just sitting on the couch and moping about my life, I'm going to start moving instead’, there's a lot of different things that you can fill into the stop. But basically, you want to fill in anything that is stopping you from moving forward with your health and fitness. Anything that's stopping you from eliminating pain from your life.

And then lastly, if there's anything that you did well, in that week, then you can put that into the Continue category. So I usually fill in three things on my Start category, three things in my Stop category. And then I'll fill in three things in my Continue category.

And simply enough for me, I'm a very tech-savvy person. So I will actually put an event that occurs every single Sunday at around five to six in the morning. So right when I wake up, this is immediately the thing that I do is assess my week or assess the month. And then I want to look forward at the things ahead of me. Once I look forward and look back, then I'll say I'm going to start doing this, stop doing this. And therefore I'm going to continue to do this because that was working for me. So hopefully that makes sense.

So number two is: you need to take an active approach. And the way I always approach this especially when somebody says like, “Well Jay, I want to get rid of XYZ pain”. And then I asked them, “Okay, so what have you been doing so far from a treatment standpoint of you doing your own self-treatments? Have you been seeking out somebody?” And a lot of times it's really just saying, “well I've done heat packs, I've taken medication, I've done infrared therapy”.

You might have done a little bit of massage, and anything, basically anything in which it you don't have an active control over is what we call a passive approach. Passive approach is where a lot of times you're submitting to some form of treatments, or you put a heat pack on your body and you just sit there, that is what we consider a passive approach. But the mindset around that I want you to incorporate is think about this.

Usually, if you say to yourself, what is the goal, the goal may be to get rid of back pain, or to get rid of neck pain. Let's say that's your overarching goal, if you've been dealing with that for a certain amount of months or years, but I'm going to ask you another question. What is the goal for why you want to achieve that? So I'll say to you, why do you want to get rid of neck pain? Or why do you want to get rid of shoulder pain or knee pain?

And usually, the answer is something along the lines of “well, I want to be able to run again, I want to be able to weight train again without fear. I want to be able to play with my kids without worrying about my body breaking down”. And if you look at the subsetted goal, and I asked you why you want to achieve that, that is an act of goal. That act of goal of you wanting to run that is being active.

You wanting to pick up your kid again, that's being active, you wanting to play and participate with your spouse and your friends and do hiking and do all the things that life gives us. That's being active, that's an active goal. So why is it that so many people in the world are taking a passive approach to active goals? It really doesn't make sense. Now, I'm not downing anything in regards to massage, or let's say anything where needles are being put into your back. I support all everything in the health care system.

But you also have to think about anything that's purely passive is not going to get you to your active goals. And there's actually research about this, there was an article that really stuck out to me about the detriments of taking a purely 100% passive approach. And the quote that I want to leave you with, that will know that I'll never forget is basically passive modalities are a short-term fix at a long-term cost. So you might be getting some short-term gains, you might get some relief temporarily. But you really are essentially just either wasting your time, energy, and resources towards things that aren't getting you towards your active goal.

Short-term fix at a long-term cost that may cost you in terms of time, meaning that you might, you might be constantly going to get the certain treatments every single week or every single month. And you do that for years and get absolutely nowhere. Or you continuously continue to buy medication, or put heat packs on your body every single time that you have pain after work. And you just keep repeating that same vicious cycle over and over again of getting some relief going to sleep, and then all of a sudden your pain comes back.

The research also shows that passive approaches aren't necessarily bad, I think there's always a role with heat packs. If you look at athletes, after they play some sort of sport, they still use ice packs, and those are all considered passive. But at the same time, a passive approach must be combined with something active.

That means that you combine heat packs with let's say, strength training. Or let's say you combine a heat pack, now that your muscles feel less tense, then you can start to stretch or mobilize your body. Or let's say you do get a massage. But after you get that massage your body, essentially you increase that window function temporarily. So now you can do a little bit of jogging. Now you can actually start going outside and walking without your back flaring up because you gotten a massage.

So get this number two is to take an active approach, you can still use passive modalities, but you cannot use that in isolation. You want to take autonomy and independence over your own body. You don't want to submit your body and your mind to something that is outside your control. And that's essentially maybe going to massage therapy or going to something and saying to yourself, “Well, I'm just going to give you my credit card, and then you're going to do the work towards me and I'm just going to live pain-free”. It doesn't work that way. So number two is: take an active approach.

Always have active supersede anything passive. That means that you need to take autonomy, you need to start strength training, you need to start mobilizing your body and actually start moving it because oftentimes movement is the medicine and that is taking an active approach towards your active goals.

Alright, so number three. My last and final tip is: separating yourself and not identifying as a person with chronic pain. And this one holds true to so many people, so many of my clients that identified as a person with chronic pain, and it doesn't have to be necessarily identifying as a person with chronic pain, it could just be that you identify as a disc, you identify as a degenerated person.

Too many times I hear that when people are talking with me, and they're considering working with me, is they say, “well, Jay, I don't know if you can help me because, you know, my, I identify as a chronic pain person, I have degenerative disc disease, I have a prolapsed disc, I have a disc that's out of alignment”. And unfortunately, that's the negative narrative to too many health professionals portray on to their clients or patients is that they tell them, these negative things, that sometimes they don't have the education of knowing how to fix it. So therefore, they just get fixated on the fact that they are their body part. They are a degenerated person, they're broken, they're fragile.

And I'm here to say to you, that you can, that the more that you can identify as that person, the more that your actions are going to be flipped, reflected based on that identity.

So I'll give you an example. If you identify as a chronic pain person, or you identify as a degenerative disc, like a lower back, let's say you have like a disc issue, then what's going to happen is that that's going to be reflected on your beliefs. And so you're going to, you're going to have these negative beliefs upon what you can and can't do. Therefore, the actions that you take, are not going to be very strong, because you're going to protect yourself, you're going to feel very fragile, you're not going to want to wait train or want to mobilize or twist your spine, because you're too fearful of what might happen to your body because you are a degenerated disc.

And therefore, what results are you going to get, those results are not going to be very good, you're going to anticipate pain, your body is going to get stiffer. And if you don't move your body, well, it's going to go through atrophy, and you're going to weaken your body. And that all starts with identity, you're identifying as a fragile person you're identifying as somebody that's broken, that's not able to do the things that you want to do.

Now, I'll tell you this, and I want you to do this one exercise with me. And so I want you right now, unless you're driving or doing something, you're multitasking, I understand this a podcast. But I want you to either close your eyes, or at least at minimum, imagine right now, a yellow triangle, I want you to just imagine in your head, close your eyes if you're able to. And I want you to imagine a yellow triangle.

Yellow triangle is getting more vivid, you can see the color is the color of the sun, you can see the three points. It's a yellow triangle. And I want you to imagine the yellow triangle getting more vivid, it's getting larger, okay, keep your eyes closed. And I want you to just imagine a very black background, and this super bright triangle, literally at the smack dab in front of your face. And keep imagining it's getting brighter, sharper, you can see the edges. It's very vivid.

Now, I want you to think about a blue circle, I want you to imagine and paint a blue circle in your head, that yellow triangle right now is actually morphing into a blue circle. So you can see the edges of the triangles starting to melt away, you start to see it becoming more rounded, you start to see that goes from yellow into a green. And then you start to imagine the blue circle, you start to imagine it getting more vivid. And now it's a big, large blue circle.

And now there's no there's no angles. Now it's perfectly round as the most round, blue circle you've ever seen. And keep imagining it. Now, I want you to open your eyes. Or I want you to now answer this question. At any points during that one small exercise. Did you think that you were a yellow triangle? At any points during that exercise? Did you feel that you were a blue circle? I'm asking that question because most of you will probably say no.

You know that you're still Mary, you know that you're still James, you know that you're still Fred. At no point did you think that you're a triangle or a circle? At no point did you think that's absurd to think that you became a circle or a triangle? So why is it that you think that you are a sufferer? Why do you think that you are a degenerate? Why do you think You are broken or fragile.

Because we start to identify as that we started to identify as our thoughts, when in fact that you were born into this world to do great things, you were born into this world to be strong, you're born into this world, to be who you are. To be a person that cares for people that helps people, you were born to be a mom or a dad, you're born to be a great colleague, you were born to be an athlete, okay, you were born to be somebody different.

You don't identify as your negative thoughts, you don't identify as a degenerate, because when you do, that reflects on your beliefs that reflects on your actions, and therefore that reflects greatly on the results that you're going to get from here on out. So, identify, start identifying as somebody that is strong, again, start identifying as a person that you want to become, and I can't stress that enough, I tell my clients all the all the time, you need to start identifying as the person that you want to become, you start identifying as a person that consistently gets to the gym three days a week, and strength trains, you identify as a person that invest in their health that I invest in building a gym at home, and actually starts using that gym, you stop identifying as the person that when you're in pain, you just sit on the couch, and you just watch Netflix, and you just let your body wither away, you start identifying as the person that you want to become.

And for anybody that deals with chronic pain, I encourage you to start identifying as a person that is strong, that's resilient, that can overcome chronic pain that can overcome anything in their path.

Right. So just to recap, this, number one is to: look forward and stop looking backwards. Number two is to: start taking an active approach and to start prioritizing a more active approach over a passive one. And then number three is to: start identifying as a person that you want to become and stop identifying either as your diagnosis or stop identifying as a person who suffers with chronic pain.

So that's what I have for you guys today. And I hope that you found that extremely helpful. If you found it helpful. I'd love if you can support this channel by sharing this to your social media, leaving a ranking or a review so that way this podcast can reach more people that can use this information.

And lastly, also subscribe and follow so that way you never miss out on any episodes. We air an episode every single Wednesday. And I hope that you have a beautiful rest of your day and you can utilize some of the information that I just gave to you today. Take care