Managing Health: Sensations without Stories

I have worked with many clients who have anxiety around health issues. These complaints may look like constant health conditions, chronic pain, or never-ending, undiagnosed, nagging physical sensations. The first action is encouraging them to speak with a doctor or medical practitioner. There is no substitute for running tests, getting advice and protocols from medical and health professionals, and stopping things that are creating injury.

Secondly, I help them reduce shame or fear about the issue “being in their head.” Too many Western medicine models dismiss health problems that don’t appear on a test or x-ray. I believe in the body’s ability to send warning signals to the brain and our ability to interpret those signals. It is also essential to know that sometimes, our interpretation is skewed. Pain is our brain’s interpretation of danger, and it is important to understand that our neural pathways can get stuck sometimes, which leads to a misinterpretation or overreaction to pain. It doesn’t mean the pain is false or doesn’t exist. It does mean that the pain may not need a three-alarm warning but a much milder notice.

Your body and brain are always connected, meaning what you are experiencing emotionally and mentally impacts the physical functioning of your body. Saying it even more plainly, what you think and feel impacts your pain. This is even more linked when you have had a fight or flight response to a painful experience. Let’s say you hurt your knee so much that you needed surgery. You have now recovered from the surgery, but every time you experience a sensation in that area, your neural pathway is ignited with the three-alarm call of danger. This increases stress, anxiety, and cortisol levels and may even prolong the pain. Suppose we learn to restructure our cognitive interpretation of this sensation and bring the noticing of the pain down to a glancing nod. In that case, we help to rewire the neural pathway, which eventually leads to a reduction in pain.   

Reviewing pain from this model means we do not ignore or minimize it, but we add a layer of exploration by addressing the psychological patterns that may be contributing to repeated anxieties around symptoms. We must pay attention and manage pain through the physical and psychological realms.

Sensations without Stories

Trusting your interpretation is one of the hardest parts of mindfully interpreting pain sensations, so we will practice noticing sensations without creating a story about them. This practice can only be done if you first assess whether this recurring pain needs medical attention.

I call it “sensations without stories" to highlight that our mind wants to categorize and make sense of all we encounter. For example, you walk into a room and smell cinnamon. Your mind may immediately go to a fond memory, “Ahh, smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” or perhaps an unfavorable past event, “Ugh, just like my college roommate’s candle she used to cover up her smoking.” What if we abandon the story of the smell and note “smells like cinnamon”?

This is what I want you to try to do with a recurring pain issue (again, one that you know doesn’t need medical attention or one that a health practitioner has already treated). The next time a recurring issue arises, notice it without creating a story. Take a deep breath, drink some water, try meditating, allow your mind to move on to the next event, and witness if the pain subsides. It may not go away, but we want to lessen the sensation by lessening the response to fear.

There is also an app that can be helpful when dealing with chronic pain. It offers cognitive behavioral, meditation, and writing exercises to help mitigate chronic pain. Check it out here: www.curablehealth.com

While it is important to pay attention to our body, our sensations, and our analysis, we must also check our hypervigilance and overreaction, especially when a previous fear response fuels them.