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[00:00:00] Welcome to Move With Deb. I'm Deb your friendly neuroplastician. And this is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind from a health at every size, judgment, free perspective. I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity, self friendship and simple neuro-plasticity techniques can rewire your bodymind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich full life that you want to live. Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.
[00:00:50] Hello and welcome to Move With Deb, the podcast. Today I'm going to talk about pain behaviors, like pain being physical pain and also emotional pain. You know, I separate these two, I don't know that we really should separate them because, you know, emotional pain only bothers us because it hurts. If we didn't feel that sting of another person's words, if we didn't feel that broken heart feeling when we think about somebody who's died or an ex-partner, it wouldn't really be pain, right? Like it, we wouldn't feel it. So I just wanna entertain this idea that like feeling, which is a physiological mind body experience, is essential to talking about pain. So physical, emotional, everything in between all of it together, we are one human ecosystem and this is how we currently relate to the world. Through our sensory system, through our feeling, thinking, brain body, all together, humanness.
[00:02:07] One of the things that I do in my work with clients is to help them look at their current pain behaviors. Yeah, from this article on the encyclopedia of pain, there's what's called the assessment of pain behaviors and this is just a little paragraph. It says, patients who. Pain exhibit a variety of behaviors that serve to communicate the fact that pain is being experienced. These behaviors have been termed pain behaviors.
[00:02:38] Pain behaviors can be verbal, like verbal descriptions of the intensity. Location and quality of pain. Vocalizations of distress, moaning or complaining or non-verbal withdrawing from activities, taking pain medication or pain related body postures or facial expressions.
[00:02:58] According to, Fordyce's operant behavioral model, pain behaviors that initially occur in response to acute injury are sometimes maintained over much longer periods of time because they lead to reinforcing consequences.. For example, a brief period of bedrest can be adaptive in response to a acute pain, but when pain persists, Excessive bedrest can promote deconditioning.
[00:03:24] And by pain behaviors, I mean, what are the things that you do, think or feel when you are experiencing an uncomfortable physiological or somatic experience or even the anticipation of one. And the way that we rewrite these pain behaviors, which really when we look at it from a neurobiological viewpoint they become habits.
[00:03:57] Anything that we do with repetition becomes a habit. And I sometimes like to think of it that way, because when we unlink pain behaviors, we often are continuing to pull that thread and unlink pain. So I think it's an important first step. So pain behavior might mean having back pain and thinking about not being able to sit in some chairs, sitting in other chairs, thinking about how chairs are going to be uncomfortable.
[00:04:24] Thinking about the pain or the discomfort that you will feel if you sit in this chair for a certain amount of time. So there's the attention and the focus both on the sensation in the body, but also on the surrounding environment, the things that you're going to be doing that you're either currently doing now in the present moment or that you will be doing in the future.
[00:04:49] So maybe that's like walking up and down stairs. So if you have knee pain or foot pain or leg pain, you know, you're already thinking about that experience of going up and down the stairs. Oftentimes then we do things don't take stairs, avoid stairs and a lot of these things that we do, these pain behaviors are about facilitating our life.
[00:05:11] And so I'm not discussing a pain behavior as a negative thing. This is very neutral. Also I wanna think of like things that help us live and manage our lives are actually really positive. But are they reinforcing this pain behavior, which is thereby reinforcing this habitual pattern? Because the brain is a predictive machine. It's not a machine, but the brain works on prediction, and so part of healing and changing what we're experiencing now that we don't want to be experiencing relies on changing that predictive code of the brain, is interrupting the prediction and meeting it with a prediction error and kind of like putting a fork in the road for your brain and say, no, don't go down that pathway, don't go light up that neural network that you always do. This is where it can get kind of trippy cuz we're saying don't do that thing that feels really familiar and maybe also safe. Go over here where there's a lot of uncertainty but break that predictive code. And that's what we're trying to create in the mind and body.
[00:06:24] There's a lot of different ways that we do this. People achieve great feats of healing by getting a massage, taking a vacation, all kinds of things that we can do that help us feel better. Taking a medication, getting a surgery. There's some great studies on sham surgeries being more effective than the actual surgery. So there's a whole system of belief and condition responses. But what we're looking at is, what are your current pain behaviors? What do you do when you feel discomfort? When you feel physiological discomfort. So maybe you feel the beginning of a headache, you feel something that feels like the beginning of a headache. You start to notice what's happening in your body. Maybe there is some tension that comes on.
[00:07:17] I notice this happens a lot for my clients, like as they go to bed, the anticipation of not being able to sleep or when they wake up in the morning, the like anticipation of whatever it is that the day is going to bring them.
[00:07:33] So there's a lot of ways in which these pain behaviors are very subtle. They get kind of conditioned into our day. We start to experience them without conscious effort, right? That's how the brain automates things is we do things, especially around pain. We do things that help us feel better, and then that becomes part of the conditioned response, and then that becomes part of what we just automatically do.
[00:08:01] So we automatically don't sit in a chair. We automatically get up and do a certain series of activities or exercises. We avoid certain things and we do other things. And so, my invitation is to start to notice what you're doing. What leads you into a sense of panic or overwhelm, being able to notice a change in your physiology. Being able to see and notice, a shift in your breathing, being able to witness.
[00:08:35] So part of this is creating this external curious witness to you going through your life. And this is how we create that pathway to knowing where we're going to apply this tool of, what am I calling this, we're calling this tool of like creating prediction errors. And you know, it sounds really intense, creating a prediction error, but a prediction error, could be doing somatic tracking, a prediction error could be, shifting our focus and our attention. And in hypnosis we do this together in our sessions. We sense into something that feels uncomfortable and we explore it, not to know kind of why it's going on, but to watch it change, to teach the brain that change is possible.
[00:09:23] So when we look at our pain behaviors, what's really important is there's nothing wrong with having pain behaviors. It all makes a lot of sense. If we think that sitting at our desk or having a certain kind of posture or writing or typing or um, walking up and down stairs. I mean, can be very complicated cuz there's a lot of movement that's happening and there's also, depending on your body size, a lot of load to contend with.
[00:09:56] So sure we can have lots of strong feelings, responses to discomfort and pain. We were never taught to like explore the pain, get curious about the pain, enter into the sensations with this curious attunement that we get in somatic tracking or in hypnosis, we even go one step further.
[00:10:24] In hypnosis, we are like, what are you noticing in your body? And if you were to imagine that feeling having a color, what color would it be? And we go right into the change in the session. What do you imagine would feel better? What color would feel better? What are you noticing that shape? What has to happen to that shape for it to change? So in our session, in this container of healing, we create change and then, I mean I teach you how to create change for yourself cuz that is always my goal, which is about teaching empowerment. But first we need to be willing to look at, and a lot of pain behaviors are really about avoiding. And again, of course we wanna avoid things that feel uncomfortable, things that feel painful.
[00:11:14] Of course we do. We are hardwired for that. We are hardwired to avoid pain, to seek out pleasure. Of course we are. That's how we survive. But, Because we know a bunch of stuff about the brain and how it works, and it works on this predictive coding, what we want to do is to teach the brain that this pain, these unpleasant sensations, you know, and I'm assuming that if you're listening to this, right, you've gotten things ruled out.
[00:11:41] We want to rule out, tumors, infections, broken bones. So assuming that none of those things are what's going on, we wanna look at and explore how we, teach the brain that this sensation is not necessary and it's certainly not dangerous, right? If we have butterflies in our chest or our chest constricts when we're afraid. Yes. That's an embodied response to fear, to a thought, to a belief. Maybe it is a physiological startle response because there's a loud sound behind you.
[00:12:20] Because it's a podcast, I'm casting broadly, when we do work together, we find out exactly when was the last time you had this experience. And we look at it, we get curious, we find a way to safely explore. You know, if it's a strong emotion that you feel like you're not allowed to feel. So if we have shame or we have anger, a lot of times having strong emotions wasn't safe in our family.
[00:12:45] So what we learned was to suppress those feelings. And so we get really good at suppressing feelings and that's okay. Or until they like, you know, can't be suppressed anymore, and then they explode out of you and then, you know, you have to deal with the repercussions of that. So there's a lot of exploration that takes place in observing, noticing, getting curious and checking out pain behaviors.
[00:13:15] Sometimes they're super straightforward. We have a belief that sitting on hard chairs is not good for your back, then what we do is break that predictive code by sitting in a lot of different chairs, by sensing into safety, by sitting longer. Sometimes it's with graded exposure sitting in a chair.
[00:13:35] Sometimes it's just with imagining sitting in a chair and bringing a sense of comfort and ease to that process. Teaching the brain. That it is safe. So there's lots of different ways, but talking about pain behaviors because I want you to get curious about them. And in getting curious. I think getting curious is like one of the foundational pieces of the heart of my change work with people.
[00:14:09] Because when we are curious, we can start to notice ourselves with so much more compassion, so much more, understanding. And I have that I notice practice, so there's a podcast called I Notice, and I notice it's so simple. It's really just like I notice that I'm thinking this and I notice that I'm feeling that and getting to know our own conditioned responses. So in doing this work, it can, we can notice like, Hey, when I feel angry, I notice that I quickly get involved in my phone. So I can really slow that down and understand this anger is uncomfortable for me to be with, and I am looking for a distraction because I don't like that feeling.
[00:14:56] That feeling I don't wanna be with because I, maybe think it's dangerous. When we don't like it, we're not gonna hang around for it. But slowing it down, sensing into the feeling, noticing how it shifts, how it plays out in my body, teaching me that this feeling is not dangerous at all, and maybe I can think about.
[00:15:18] When was the first time I felt something like this and kind of, you know, go back in time, get in my little time capsule or my TARDIS and go visit the me who first started to feel that way and offer them something different. So pain behaviors are essential at being able to witness, get curious about explore, and I want you to meet all of that without shame, with like a giant two handfuls of compassion and love for yourself.
[00:15:54] I'm always trying to sell people on like feeling your feelings and going into sensations and you know, creating this kind of mind body wonderland that you're willing to explore. . And so, yeah, I don't want you to think like, oh my God, this is gonna be the worst thing ever and I have to grit my teeth and bear my way through it because then you're gonna get more of that. You're not gonna wanna do it. I don't blame you. I don't wanna do it like that. I have definitely been in that place and I didn't wanna do it either.
[00:16:27] And I do this for a living. This is kind of a tangent, but it's related. I was talking to a friend and she was telling me she's been waking up with neck, shoulder, and jaw pain. We're both body practitioners and so we've got a lot of tools in our toolkit and you know, so we're talking about doing self-massage and getting massage and doing all the things to affect change in the body. And you know, this used to be my orientation fixing. You know, there's just something, something we can do that's gonna unlock whatever this thing is that's happening that I don't like.
[00:17:04] Embedded in that experience is this intensity around not wanting to feel the uncomfortable feeling that is being felt. So one thing I offered her was, Hey, what we want. Like the global we, right. What we want is the release of this tension, is a softening in the body and the mind both physiologically, a softening of the tension in the jaw, but also a softening in the approach.
[00:17:36] And I was like, if hitting something head on. and it's not working, and it's not working and it's not working. It's creating this sense of defeat and this sense of frustration and this sense of like, oh God this is never gonna change. That I will always feel this way, then the answer is to let that go because that repeat cycle is one of the reasons why people stay in pain. It's like then there's some other solution, some other solution, some other solution. It's always external. It's gotta be applied to the body and it's gonna fix it. And what I invited instead is to think about the softening that we want to be happening on the inside of the body.
[00:18:17] We want the jaw to relax, the muscles to feel pliable, to have the breath feel expansive and to slow down that tension and to just invite in a sense of release. And so there's lots of different ways that that can be done. But as you can tell already I'm just slowing down and I'm creating this visual. One of the things I offered her was this idea of imagining before you go to bed, being on a cloud, or if it's even too intense to see yourself because you have fear or shame or it's just hard to even imagine yourself.
[00:18:58] Can you imagine something that makes you smile? Like maybe it's a big, fluffy dog on a big fluffy cloud. And can you sense into that fluffiness and how light that cloud must be and how soft that dog feels. And just go into that image and invite that image inside of you and imagine that feeling of lightness and softness and fluffiness filling you up.
[00:19:29] We talked about, you know, sometimes it's like being with ourselves is like being with a feral cat, and it's like if you look at the cat, it's gonna run away. So you just gotta be like, look at that cat through the side of your vision, through your peripheral vision. When you're trying to create a sense of peace, so an animal or a person knows that you're safe, right? So you hold yourself still. You create that change and shift in your body so that the other being can also feel that. Creating this resonance.
[00:20:01] I offered my friend, which was to stop trying so hard and to start sensing the feeling of release that you wanna be feeling. And it doesn't mean like don't get a massage and it doesn't mean don't use your tools like a massage ball.
[00:20:17] But there's the difference, like if you're using a foam roller and you're just rolling out. You know, it's not a wonder if you feel really sore, but if you like, maybe lay on the foam roller, imagining your body softening around it, feeling that sense of release happening as your body conforms around the foam roller, taking deep breaths in, letting them go, feeling that muscle tonus shift and melt and relax. We can do that. That's a different approach, same tool, different approach. So there's so many things to look at with pain behaviors, we wanna just start looking at what are you doing? When you are avoiding pain and discomfort?
[00:21:03] Without judgment, what are you doing? Are you taking a pill? Are you watching tv? Are you smoking pot? Are you doing like whatever it is. How is the anticipation of pain also changing your behavior? In that you get to explore where you can make shifts, where you can work on updating that predictive code and creating change. If you don't wanna change, if you don't wanna feel better, if you don't want this pain to change, that's also fine. I didn't really mean it that way, but like, I mean, maybe you don't want to do the change work to change things, but I would say even if you are going to the Doctor. Or even if you are taking medication, then you want things to be and feel differently than they do. And so, why not also try this approach, this way to create change.
[00:22:02] Just start to explore what those pain behaviors are. Even when you're exploring those pain behaviors that you have done. Can you explore them in a way that honors who you are, how you cope, what you can create, even when you're feeling pain or discomfort. Is there empowerment in there for you to claim even if we want things to change.
[00:22:32] So I hope that this podcast has helped you wanna get curious about what your pain behaviors are and how they're helping you or not helping you. Which ones just been so automated over a period of time that you aren't even aware of them. Maybe you don't even think about them, but once we bring your attention and awareness to it, you can start to notice them and be like, okay, what if I changed them.
[00:23:00] Way back when I was working with my client, Lauren, on the preamble to her migraines. She would start to feel a sensation and then she had a whole series of pain behaviors around anticipating migraine, feeling worried about the rest of her day, negative self-talk, like all kinds of things would, would be happening inside of this experience that she wasn't really aware of until we did the work to bring her awareness to it.
[00:23:30] And when we were able to slow it down, she noticed there was so much spaciousness between the first sensation. And you know, where she thought it was going to go based on her experience of where had it been.
[00:23:45] And in that spaciousness that she created by doing mind body work, she was able to change her pain behaviors and she was able to change her pain and she stopped having migraines. She stopped needing medication. I don't wanna say that those results are typical or possible for everyone. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. This is what we get to explore. I've definitely helped a lot of people on headaches, migraines and persistent headaches. Part of healing is, is working on pain behaviors and starting to slow down, see the space in between the behaviors, start to look at the behaviors and the predictive coding, and really just break it down with a lot of love and a lot of compassion, and a lot of care, and a lot of curiosity,
[00:24:35] And if any of that is interesting to you and you're curious about exploring, mindbody hypno coaching with me, please book a curiosity call with me. I've got some openings for new one-on-one clients for my 12 week pain recovery program. Which I teach you the basics of the neuroscience of pain, but also we just get to work on changing your pain.
[00:25:00] Also I have this new thing that I'm working on, which is just like, if you wanna explore hypnosis, You wanna jump into some change work? You wanna change a habit that's been bothering you? I did work with my teacher on like being able to get up in the morning and go take a walk and like, yeah, it's not perfect, but what's really changed for me is actually the high intensity, unpleasant emotional reaction of despair when I would think about doing something and not do it. That has been the number one main shift that has like changed everything my life. Some days I take a walk, some days I don't take a walk and that part feels really okay with me. I take a lot more walks though, than I have before, but I also feel a lot less shitty where I choose to not take a walk .
[00:25:50] And that in and of itself is radical to me. That's unwiring an emotional response I've had for most of my life and I'm 53 years old. So we can do some cool stuff. You can just book one session at a time or you can book a package of three sessions and we can get to work on changing stuff.
[00:26:10] Whatever it is that you wanna be different, let's, let's just get to work. Let's just start. I wanna promise you that there's nothing wrong with you. It is so common. We all have it. There are all just things that we want to be different in our world, sometimes there are things that we want other people to do differently and we don't have control over that. But what we do have control over is our response to when other people are being themselves. So that's my invitation to you. I hope that this podcast has been helpful in getting you curious and I look forward to sharing more with you. Thanks.
