Chronic pain begins as an acute pain experience that continues long after the warning signs are either ignored or mismanaged. It stands to reason that, by definition, pain is not considered “chronic” until it proves to be prolonged past the time threshold of a regular injury.

Unfortunately for the recipient of chronic pain, by the time it has become chronic it has typically progressed into a much more complicated and considerably more difficult beast to reverse.

Acute pain, pain felt at the onset of an injury, serves the purpose of alerting us to a counterproductive or harmful threat to our physiological wellbeing such as the pain you would feel if you accidentally stabbed yourself with a needle or cut into your thumb whilst trimming a nail. If the warning pain is ignored, you would stand to lose a piece of thumb or maybe blunt the needle on your bone!

Persistent denial of that pain could result in considerably greater injury than immediate evasive action to cease the pain would entail. In the case of repetitive strain injuries, ignoring the pain of an inflamed muscle by continuing to “push through the pain” is an incredibly bad idea.

By the sixth week of continuously experienced pain, the chances of “permanent” physiological changes at the cellular level of soft tissue and muscular structure are very high if no corrective action is undertaken to assist healing and to avoid complications.

For most people, ignoring the warning signs (acute pain) can bring about a distressing, life altering and potentially career ending problem: chronic pain. Considered musculoskeletal disorders, injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow and bursitis may have responded well to rest in their initial stages, but are often worsened as a result of well-intended advice from physiotherapist who are for some reason taught that further placing the injury under duress by performing additional activities will somehow repair the damage!

Physiotherapy certainly has it’s place, but in our opinion, that is when the injury has had time to heal and begin the process of cellular renewal. Then and only then does it make sense to start using the muscle again to avoid atrophy and to assist in its re-growth.

Just like the determining factor responsible for the initial tension and inflammatory process that instigated the original pain, the time it takes for an injury to heal is governed greatly by the level of stress a person is experiencing.

Reducing the stress-load on both your body and your mind will ensure that your biological systems are operating at peak efficiency and assist you in avoiding further injury whilst convalescing. Persisting with physical activities that worsen pain send a VERY strong message to the subconscious mind, ingraining at a very deep level that although aware of the pain, it is irrelevant to you.

Being keen to serve you as efficiently as possible, your brain will eventually learn to hard-wire the pain response into a series of neural-networks similar to the connections that access thoughts of childhood when triggered by the smell of Play-dow™ or conjure up feelings of either fun or fear when confronted by a clown.

Advertisers constantly take advantage of our capacity to evoke feelings from a simple image when they cleverly devise the perfect hook for marketing campaigns and rely on this fact when bombarding us with their branding. Whatever we see, hear, smell, feel or taste enough times, gets hard-wired into our synaptic reflexes, eventually evoking a reliable response.

If you are finding this notion hard to believe, consider for a moment the fine motor skills displayed by a professional tennis player or concert pianist. Some people may be born with a particular propensity or gift to play sports or emotively move audiences with music, but, genetic disposition aside, these abilities only thrive with hours of repetitive performance (practice). The act of repeating fine movements teaches the muscles exacting precision which, once hardwired, can achieve seemingly effortless command that requires very little intellectual involvement.

We are all capable of hard-wiring specific responses to intentions, otherwise the once difficult act of writing our names or tying our shoes would prove challenging daily. Once learned, muscular responses and the minute nerve impulses that accompany them become ingrained (or hard-wired) in our subconscious minds, allowing us to focus more on what words we wish to write or the purpose for putting on our shoes and leaving the house.

The worse thing we can do is to train our brains to release pain signals every time a particular movement is performed! Sadly, 33.3% of us have.