Your Mind-Body Solution
For Chronic Pain

What if the thing you reach for when you’re exhausted isn’t actually what helps you recover? After an intense day, it’s natural to want to collapse on the couch, scroll your phone, or zone out in front of the TV. But there’s an important distinction between rest and recovery. Rest helps you stop; active recovery helps replenish you. Drawing on lessons from peak-performance science, this post explores how simple activities like walking, exercise, time in nature, creativity, socializing, or other forms of meaningful engagement can help your brain and nervous system recalibrate after a demanding day. The goal isn’t perfect balance — it’s finding ways to offset the particular demands of your everyday life.

On the path to healing chronic pain, sometimes our brains will mess with us. In fact, it’s a feature of our biology — when our situations change for the better, our brains have the habit of redefining what it classifies as a "problem." We instinctively move the goalposts, which can mask that things are, in fact, improving. The same applies for solving chronic pain & other symptoms, and so part of recovery will be to overcome your brain's built-in biases (we all have 'em!) that work to keep our perceptions basically the same over time. Read on to learn more about this feature of our brains and how to help your perception shift in the right direction.

One of my favorite things about working with Pain Reprocessing Therapy clients is how quickly improvement can happen. Clients routinely share real shifts in their pain & symptoms in the first few sessions. Then…the work begins. Ups & downs with symptoms happen. Flares & setbacks come along. Or the pain gets better but just hasn't quite gone away yet. Cue the frustration! When we hit that frustration, it most definitely doesn’t feel good, and many of us stop there because we really don’t like that feeling. Read on here — you’re about to learn why feeling frustrated is the exact thing we need to teach our nervous systems something new.

When you’re searching for a solution to chronic pain, undoubtedly your feed fills with tales promising "5 steps to solving your chronic pain" or "with this program I solved my pain in 3 sessions!" That type of messaging is really enticing, especially when we've been in pain for months, years, or even decades. So it's really tempting to set our expectations of healing to align with those fast-results stories. Those stories don’t sync with the reality of healing for most people though, and the quick solution we’re hoping for gives way to what you really need in order to heal.

Many, many times over my years working with folks in pain (going wayyy back to 2008 now!), I've had clients come into sessions and pepper me with questions about a pain episode they've experienced since our last meeting. For a long time I tried to figure those things out, there must be something going on! But time and again, based on my own experience with my body and by working with hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, I've come to learn this simple truth: Bodies just do weird shit sometimes. And most of the time, it's not a big deal. Read on to learn more and discover some simple tools you can use to reduce the uncertainty that goes with random pain episodes.

Returning to movement and activity while recovering from pain can feel extremely high stakes. And it's often laced with advice, guidance & prescribed routines from professionals like PTs or physios, as well as fear, frustration, uncertainty and a host of other emotions. To recover from chronic pain, finding safety, ease, and even playfulness & laughter are incredibly important. What’s a shortcut to get there? An exploratory mindset when you move. Read on to learn exactly what an exploratory mindset is, how to cultivate one, and how it can help you in your pain recovery journey.