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It may be hard to believe, but some of the activities that you love may actually be causing you pain.
To understand pain, it is essential to understand the learning process of the brain. When we learn a new thing, we naturally break the process down step by step.
We start slowly and use the cortex of our brain to pay attention to the activity we are learning. Our brain learns by sensing and feeling and repetition.
As we continue to refine and adapt, the movement graduates from being unfamiliar and unnatural to familiar and natural. This is the process of habituation.
This is how we learn and develop all life skills.
Think about learning how to drive a car, for example. When you got your learner’s permit and started driving, you had to sequentially and intentionally think about every step in the learning process.
You got in the car, closed the door. Next, you learned to adjust your mirrors to the right height. Then you put on your seatbelt.
You had to consciously think, step by step, about each aspect of driving. Your brain was learning the whole time.
All of these actions required you to actively use the cortex of your brain, where, one step at a time, you learn new information.
And then, through conscious repetition, your efficiency improves and the steps became automatic and habitual. And now, 4-10-50 years later, driving is likely a very habituated movement for all of us.
With practice and learning, driving skills have become entirely automatic and involuntary. The subcortex of the brain has taken over and now manages this complex series of steps to efficiently get us from point A to B, requiring significantly less conscious thought.
This a great example of habitation and the learning process from cortex to subcortex, voluntary to involuntary.
And every time we learn something new, whether it is good for us or bad for us this process happens again.
Let’s look at some examples.
The more we sit in a poor posture and slouch forward, the more our brain learns to keep our muscles in this pattern, and over time, it becomes harder to sit up straight.
This leads to slumped posture, affecting:
And how about your favorite activities? We train specific muscles to perform repeatedly and successfully when we do the same physical exercise day in and day out, week after week.
This could be the same:
but never doing any inquiry to ensure the correct muscles are working.
Give some thought to how these repetitive actions and activities you love may actually be causing you pain.
Consider hiking it is an activity that requires propulsion from the back line muscles. Within a millisecond of getting ready to take your first step, your back muscles engage.
Someone who is an avid walker or hiker might report that they have lower back pain or tight hips. The brain learns to recruit the muscles for hiking and this engagement for miles and miles, means that, over time, those muscles get tight from repetitive use and can stay tight, even when we are no longer doing the activity.
Learning more about somatic movement and how your muscles are performing can help you become more aware of the ways you have become habituated in your movements, mindset, and behaviours.
It will provide you with simple and easy exercises that you can do daily that release these tension patterns creating freedom in your body so you can enjoy your activities and experience a sense of well-being for healthy aging.
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