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Should we accept pain as a normal part of aging?
Chronic tension/pain has become an epidemic across North America and the industrialized world. The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined.
Persistent or recurring pain is defined as pain lasting more than six months after the original tissue damage has healed. The research on chronic (persistent/recurring) pain is compelling.
The annual cost to industrialized countries in health care resources and lost productivity is increasing every year. In 2017, the University of Michigan Health reported that the annual cost of treatment and lost productivity due to chronic pain in the USA was $635 billion.
As a society, we have learned to accept pain as a normal part of life and aging. But should we?
What if we told you that your stiffness and tension has more to do with the fact that you have learned to move less and have developed some poor movement patterns as you age? Thomas Hanna, author of Somatics: Reawakening The Mind's Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health proved that pain and tension are not a foregone conclusion.
Think back to what life was like when you were a child. You ran, jumped, rolled, and hung upside down. In fact, you moved freely and often without much thought as to how to move.
Then as you got older, you moved less. Maybe you sat more in a desk, held more stress, or you let go of that favorite sport that you did when you were younger because you thought, I can’t do that, I might get injured. This may have coincided with more bracing in your movements in fear of what could go wrong.
The truth is that as we get older, we move less and start to move in more repetitive patterns. Our muscles become shortened and stuck, and this leads to wear and tear on our joints.
These restricted movement patterns become deeply ingrained in our brains to the point where they become involuntary. We just aren’t aware that we are moving in limited ways. These patterns and habits are further affected and ingrained by stress.
The good news is that this can all be changed. We can all learn to move well again, and it is simpler than we think. It involves conscious and deliberate retraining of our movement patterns in gentle and supportive ways.
The latest pain research confirms that pain does not reside in the muscles; it resides in the brain. The good news is that you can change your pain by resetting the messages coming from the brain to your muscles.
The non-pharmaceutical approach to pain relief that Resolve Pain Guru teaches is called The Method and can be done in as little as 15 min per day. Pain patterns can be changed, and you can learn to move well again, no matter what your age. We invite you to join us.
