I hear you coming. How can my cancer be neutral when I’m in so much pain? Going through cancer treatment, we experience pain on a regular basis: chemotherapy; radiation; surgery; blood tests; MRIs; CT or PET scans; needles; tubes; ripping band-aids; distasteful liquids… Our bodies go through a lot. We experience pain almost on a daily basis.
Pain is a sensation. Like cold, hot, pressure, texture of an object, or even hunger when you don’t eat for 3 days. A sensation is information going from your body to your brain. And pain is only that: information going from the body to the brain. What you make of that information is up to your brain to decide.
Your brain can decide that something is wrong. It needs to pay immediate attention to the sensation. To make sure our full attention is on this issue, the sensation of pain will increase. The enhanced sensation is again information sent to the brain. Our brain then thinks that something is terribly wrong and requires immediate action. This feedback loop is a survival mechanism, to put us quickly in fight or flight mode.
But the brain can also decide that everything is OK and not make a big deal of it. And in that case the experience of pain tends to fade or even disappear.
We see this with small children. Playing in the park with their friends, they run and fall. Being so caught up in their game, they jump back up and don’t seem to even feel any pain. The same child can fall at home in front of his mom. The mom runs to him saying that it’s awful, that he must have hurt himself, asking if he’s ok. The child this time feels lots of pain and starts crying like if it’s a matter of life or death.
Another example is when we go to the gym. Not only is it painful while we are lifting the weights, but then we have to deal with soreness for a weeklong. We can make it mean that we aren’t good at this, that it’s too hard, that it’s too painful. Again, the feedback loop will reinforce the sensation of pain. Or, we make it mean that we put in the right amount of effort, that it’s the way to being fit, that we have a healthy lifestyle. You get to a point where the pain not only doesn’t bother you but even where you look forward to feeling the soreness.
Our brain has tremendous power over our experience of pain. In my personal experience, I framed feeling pain as the way to returning to perfect health again. I would even frame it as a gift that my present self was offering to my future self. My present-self was going through the pain so that my future-self could enjoy perfect health (like the gym analogy).
If you experiencing pain right now in your life, what do you make it mean?
Pain is real. Suffering is optional.
With love,
Laurent