You Don’t Just Wake Up With Pain

by Dr. Zach Walker

This title may seem like it is a lie, but the majority of the time, it is true. I will say you do wake up with pain, but this pain isn’t just coming out of nowhere. What I mean by this is the pain you are experiencing in the morning or throughout the day has been with you for days, weeks, months, or sometimes even years. The body is very good at compensating because this allows you to go about your everyday tasks. The body/brain does not like being in pain or off-balance, so these compensation mechanisms will enable the brain to carry out day-to-day activities. However, like we have mentioned previously if you ignore something for too long, it will eventually come back with a vengeance, and this is what is happening with many of our symptoms, pain is no exception. Let's delve more into this a little more.

Like we talked about last week, pain is really experienced in the brain, and it is up to the mind to interpret that painful stimuli (nociception) and give a characteristic, location, intensity, etc. Sure, there are times when we sprain an ankle, and there is immediate pain associated with that, and most of the time, we put ice on it and rest the area for a certain amount of time. What we are talking about is pain that we don’t take care of from old injuries such as back/neck pain, hips, shoulders, or that is created from compensation mechanism(s). We will use an example from past posts. If we cannot use proper eye movements (please read our blog post on balance), this can create more neck activation, a form of our compensation mechanism, to allow us to look at what we want to see in the world. This sounds like a good idea, and it can be for a limited time, but this will eventually create neck pain since the neck is designed for constant movement (170,000 times a day).

You can think of the pain that you are experiencing as a culmination of events leading up to you feeling pain. Again, these events can be in the form of past injuries, overuse injuries, or compensation mechanisms. Also, if you think about it there were probably many different ways the body was trying to tell you that you need to take better care of yourself. Some of these signs could be feeling more tightness or stiffness in a particular body part or just globally, feeling like that area is functioning correctly, or range of motion (ROM) has been decreased. It is when all of these signs come together, and the brain cannot handle them anymore that we start having more pain or pain symptoms.

Short term, or what we call acute pain, isn't necessarily a bad thing because it brings more attention to the area, is telling you there is tissue damage, and we need to handle that area more carefully for the time being. What we do not like is pain that lasts for days, weeks, months, or years (chronic pain). When pain is chronic, there is not only damage to the area, but our brains lose where that area is in space. When this happens, it causes even more issues. We have talked about brain maps in the past (where our brains have a map of the entire body), but when we have increases in pain these maps get distorted and can cause even more pain or

instability to that area. One of the best ways to prevent any of this from happening is to listen to our bodies, take action when we do have any injuries, and through chiropractic neurology. How pain can create other issues: • Chronic pain causes an increase in tissues damage and • The more pain = decreases in our brain maps • When we have pain it causes increases in compensation mechanisms, but that eventually leads to pain and instability in other body areas. • Movement is the best way to update our body maps; if we

have pain, we tend not to use that area, and this causes less movement in that are.

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