What’s in your cup?

What’s in your cup?

Our bodies have an amazing ability to heal itself usually in a few weeks or months after injury. A short course of physiotherapy treatments including home exercises, education and manual therapy can help speed up the healing. However, sometimes even after receiving treatment and long after our tissues have healed, we still have pain. But why? Here are 2 reasons:

1)     pain is very poorly related to the magnitude of tissue damage that has happened

2)     it’s difficult to get out of pain if there are other life factors stressing your system

Other factors in our lives, besides muscles, tendons, and joints, can affect the amount of pain we’re in. Our emotional health and our beliefs about pain can play a huge part in pain.

Think of pain as a cup that has overflowed. Everybody has a cup that is filled with different stressors- whether that be emotional, physical, or social.  When these stressors build up, our cup overflows which leads to pain. Things that can fill up and overflow our cups include- stress, sedentary behaviours, fear of movement, poor sleep, poor nutrition, unhealthy relationships, and the list goes on. To help manage pain we can decrease some of the stressors that load the cup or build a bigger cup.

It’s not always easy to decrease some of the stressors in our lives, so let’s build a bigger cup! Ways to build a bigger cup include being active and exercising, seeking support and reassurance, building positive beliefs, improving mood, improving coping mechanisms, making better food choices, and having better sleep hygiene.

If you have any questions about pain education and management, and how to build a bigger cup, one of our practitioners at physio collective would love to help!