Are You Being a “Baby” About Your Pain?
I am.
And I recommend it! Here’s why.
How being a “baby” about pain keeps me relatively pain-free.
I’ve never been strong, athletic or physically competitive. I was a sensitive and timid kid, and would often get picked last for team sports in gym class. My timidness and “baby”-like behavior was driven by fear. Fear of everything. But, I’m definitely not recommending fear. It took me a lot of years to shake that scaredy-cat approach to life. But what it left me with is a healthy and essential “noticing” skill. And that is something that many of us could use an extra dose of.
As I grew into a confident adult, my learned hyper-vigilance dissolved into plain old vigilance. It helped me better understand what I now geek-out about, and that is: “all things everyday pain”.
As it turns out, my ability to notice early signs of pain in myself, allowed me to get important information. It was the information I needed to understand the what, where, when, why and how of each physical sensation. Of course I have an edge with all the background information about anatomy and physiology. This makes it a bit easier for me to put my aches and pains into context.
This ability to notice earliest signs of pain, in turn, gave me great insight into other people’s pain-experiences. Now my goal is to share this information with everyday people just like you. I believe strongly that we can all be our own best pain-experts. The confidence that comes from knowing more, makes us better patients once we do need to go get help. If you have a body, you deserve to have all the same information that I do.
How you react to your pain can prolong the suffering.
The feeling that you’re being a “baby” about your pain is one of 3 common, subconscious reactions when pain first strikes.
The other 2 reactions to pain that we learn when we’re kids, can be boiled down to either “walk it off — you’re fine!” or “you poor thing — let’s make that bad scary pain go away!” I delve deeper into hacking these reactions in my work with people to transform pain-coping at Stop Everyday Pain®
When you have pain, and the first thought is “you’re being such a baby”, you are just shaming yourself into silence and repression. When you push pain aside like this, it doesn’t make it go away. It’s simply being suppressed. And just like with suppressed emotions, suppressed pain will resurface eventually -more complex and more confusing than ever.
Based on the neuroscience, we now know that there are thought patterns that can worsen the experience of pain. Our brain and nervous system are doing all sorts of processing behind the scenes based on our reactions. And this processing can create a perceived reality that may or may not be accurate. Perceived reality in many different areas of life is based on learned reactions from early childhood. The same thing is true for pain.
The pain-experience is based on learned reactions.
These reactions follow us throughout life — long beyond the point at which both pain and the reaction itself, are truly relevant.
“Being a baby” has a negative connotation, but I challenge you to try turning this idea on its head. Take another look at what it really means to be a “baby”. Try embracing your natural impulse to pay attention to your pain. Whats“powering through” it can offer you important information and context about your pain-experience!
5 steps to kick your pain by being more of a “baby”
First of all — you have to re-frame this idea about being perceived as a “baby”. By feeling bothered by your pain, you are actually taking the first most important step of a proven 5 step process that I outline and detail in my TEDx talk (Transform your relationship to pain for a better future — click here to check it out).
Step 1 is to pay attention…Check!
If you’re feeling like a “baby” about it, then you’ve got that down. “Paying attention” seems simple right? But it’s not that easy for most of the patients who I see. How you pay attention matters. You have to start by ditching all your harsh judgment about your pain and that can be a work in progress but it’s really important.
Noticing your pain is completely legit.
Because pain is a valid and real experience, you’re not making it up. It’s not just in your head. You have to validate your pain-experience for yourself and that is step 2. You have to trust me when I tell you that pain is a biological experience and no matter how confusing it might seem to you and to others around you — it’s real and it deserves attention.
Step 3 is all about claiming your pain by naming it. Finding words to describe any new experience makes it a lot less scary. And because the English language doesn’t give us words that adequately describe pain in the wide array that we experience it, you have to get creative and paint a picture.
It’s not about finding a single magic word — that’s never going to be enough to explain how it is to be in your body at any given moment. The best we can do is to paint that picture. Think of how your pain compares to other things you’ve experienced. Think of going through the scenario of when the pain started or worsened — set the scene for yourself so you can walk through it in your mind like an impartial observer. You’d be amazed at the “aha moments” that can come from this sort of reflection.
Once you’ve developed language for your pain-experience it’s time to learn from it.
That’s what describing your pain can help you do — if you can’t learn from it yourself then when you seek out a healthcare practitioner for troubleshooting, the description of your experience will help others understand better how to help you — which will help you learn how to help yourself in the future.
Troubleshooting, by the way, is step number 5.
Congrats! You just turned your “being a baby” into an important part of improving your pain-coping if not completely kicking your pain.
What to do next time you hear that judge-y voice:
So what if you’re “being a baby”?! That un-jaded baby knows exactly what’s best for you and if no one had ever shamed you into thinking that there was something wrong with you for paying attention to early signs of pain, you might have saved yourself a lot of trouble from the start.
Better pain-coping grows from consistently exercising the 5 step process. When you improve your pain-coping, you improve your quality of life beyond your wildest dreams and take your power back!
You are your own best advocate. But not when you block out all the relevant information because you might feel ashamed. What you’re ashamed of is just your instinct — it’s okay to listen to your gut. But get informed so that you don’t mistake sensible instinct for irrelevant and inappropriately generalized fear.
This article first appeared on the Stop Everyday Pain® blog at www.stopeverydaypain.com
