I’ve been seeing a lot of friends and family during this holiday season and many have questions for me about pain and injury and I thought it would be great to give you an insight about one of the conversations I recently had as well as the thoughts I had around it.
I talked to a friend a couple months ago about the pain they were experiencing. I gave them some exercises to do to help with the pain. I haven’t heard from them for a while, but when I recently saw them the other weekend, they told me the pain has gotten worse. They also told me they were not able to fit in their schedule the exercises I gave them to help with the pain. They noted that they are really busy with their job, family, and household duties so it was difficult to find the time to get the exercises done.
To be quite frank, a couple of years ago, if I was told the same thing, I would have judged the person and told them they had to make time for it so they will feel better. However, as my perceptions have changed, I empathized with that friend of mine. I thought to myself that if they really feel that it’s difficult to find time to exercise and they have certain perceptions that they believe to be true, I can’t change those perceptions as a physical therapist. I can only offer tools for you to take or not take and it’s completely up to you.
Time In Relation To Pain Or Injury
What I wanted to add to these thoughts is that if you are in pain or have an injury and you do not have time to do the exercises, that’s okay and it’s no big deal. You may need to accept that pain is going to be a part of your experience for the time being and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I think that we try to avoid pain because it is annoying and it makes it difficult to do activities that we enjoy doing, but sometimes we have other priorities in our lives and that’s totally okay. The big thing is to just accept that the pain is going to be occurring for you if you don’t have the time to think about it or manage it.
That may be difficult to hear, but that’s how it is. We have priorities in our lives and if we cannot prioritize certain things, then those things are not going to get taken care of.
Alleviating Your Worries About Pain
With that being said, to alleviate your worries you might have regarding pain going on and on and worrying also that you may cause further damage, I can assure you that that is not the case every time. Many times, pain is not directly correlated to damage within your tissue or to an injury. Just because you have pain going on for a long time, it does not mean that all of a sudden you’re going to need surgery tomorrow or have some kind of invasive treatment to make it better.
Again, pain is just a signal from your brain to let you know that something is going on and it does not mean that you have any serious injury going on that requires surgery or invasive treatment.
Conclusion
What I’ll leave you with today is if you have pain and you don’t have time to deal with it, that’s okay. When the time is there when you are ready, then you can start to handle the pain. Further, you will be able to tackle it with your full attention at the right time. You will find by then that things will get better faster.
I hope this will help you let yourself off the hook if you’re feeling like you have a lot on the plate and you don’t have time to manage your pain. I promise that you’ll be okay and that when you’re ready, you’ll be able to handle and treat your pain.