Chronic pain can make your day-to-day life experiences miserable. It touches every part of your life – from cooking to hygiene, to sleeping, to relationships. With chronic pain, you never know how it is going to change throughout the day. Since the pain will not stop, you never know what to say when people ask you how you feel. You may find that some days seem easier for you than others. While you may be quick to consider going for medication, you want to find ways to manage it. Managing pain is not just about pills or surgery; there are many ways you can do it. To deal with your back pain in Newtown, you may want to seek pain management and treatment therapies. These tips will help you live with chronic pain:
Deep breathing and meditation
Consider deep breathing or meditation techniques to help relax your body. This way, it will ease the pain. Ignoring thoughts and focusing on your breath and repeating a mantra or a phrase can cause your body to relax. You may also want to seek a quiet place where you perform a relaxation technique like deep breathing. With a comfortable body position, distract yourself from thoughts, and imagine a peaceful place. Fill your abdomen with air by breathing deeply. Allow the air to fill you right from the abdomen up and let it out – think of the way you deflate a balloon.
Take away stress
Having stress can intensify chronic pain. When you have negative feelings of anger, like anxiety and stress, they can increase your body’s sensitivity to pain.
When you learn to manage your stress levels, you may be able to get some relief from pain. Consider listening to calming music to help lift your mood. It will make it more bearable to live with back pain. You can also take guided imagery to achieve a mental escape that helps you feel peaceful.
Use natural endorphins by exercising
Endorphins are neurotransmitters that allow you to enhance your mood while blocking the signals that relay pain. Exercise also helps strengthen muscles, thus helping prevent further pain or re-injury. Exercise offers other benefits, like keeping your weight down and reducing the risk of heart diseases. It also helps control blood sugar levels.
Reduce alcohol consumption
Alcohol can make your pain problem worse. When you are in pain, you want to find ways you can get adequate sleep. Sadly, many people consider alcohol as a numbing agent. However, drinking alcohol can cause more trouble when you have back pain. Alcohol worsens your sleep problem, and because pain is making sleep difficult, you do not want to double the problem by consuming alcohol.
Keep track of the pain levels
As you go about your day-to-day activities, you want to track the levels of pain you are experiencing. When you visit a pain management clinic, you will need to tell the doctor what it has been like. A journal of your pain score recorded daily helps the doctor to know how you have been feeling. It also helps your doctor understand how you’re living with it and your physical functioning level.
To help treat your back pain, you want to visit a pain management clinic specializing in the kind of pain you have. Performance Pain & Sports Medicine has a team of physicians specializing in interventional pain. These physicians will diagnose you and offer a tailored treatment program saving you on surgery costs or prolonged hospital stays.