You may not realise it, but the fear of back pain could be stopping you living your life. This may be news to you because, when back pain strikes, the physical sensation is most likely to be your immediate focus. Your initial thought is how to deal with the pain, and there are many things that can help with this, such as physiotherapy and medication.
But as the pain continues, and particularly when your back pain is long-term or chronic, a whole host of other concerns can start playing on your mind. These psychological factors can grow and grow until they become just as big an issue as the physical pain and, sometimes, surpass the actual pain itself or even make it feel worse.
Lower back pain, particularly when it continues on a long-term or chronic basis, can cause stress, fear and anxiety levels to rise. This can be due to eight reasons:
- Fear of doing something that makes the pain worse
- Fear of the pain returning
- Fear of being unable to carry on your normal routine
- Fear of not being able to work
- Fear that the pain will never improve or go away
- Fear of not sleeping
- Fear of isolation from being unable to go out, socialise or do enjoyable things
- Fear of losing control
You can read more about how your emotions play such a huge role in your sensation of pain, in our previous blog; Why A Feeling of Control is so Important to Healing Lower Back Pain – Pelvipro
Luckily, there are many things that can be done to address the fear and anxiety that accompany the physical symptoms of back pain. The most important thing is to continue with your normal routine wherever possible. Meet your friends, go to work, and carry on exercising if that’s what you are used to. Above all, put yourself in control of your back pain, not the other way round.
Pelvipro helps relieve the physical symptoms of back pain by addressing an asymmetry of the pelvis, strengthening muscles and healing damaged tissue, with 95% of our trialed patients experiencing an instant relief from pain directly after using the device.
But our initial trials of Pelvipro among both acute and chronic back pain patients also yielded some surprisingly pleasing results in relation to Pelvipro’s role in reducing the emotional effects of back pain. Among our key findings were:
- 90% of patients reported an improvement in their ability to sleep
- 95% reported a reduction in their levels of stress
- 92% were able to increase their levels of activity and take part in activities that they enjoyed doing, such as sport, walking and gardening
- 84% reported a reduction in their levels of fear
When they hit, the physical symptoms of back pain can stop us in our tracks. But it’s often the unanticipated, growing fear and anxiety that can really prevent us from living our lives the way we want to.
Fear comes from a combination of our brains being unable to predict what life is going to be like over the next few hours, days or weeks. Together with a feeling of the inability to control the problem that is causing the uncertainty, in this case back pain.
Mindfulness and meditation have been helping back pain sufferers to make great leaps forward in reducing our emotional arousal, which we feel as anxiety and fear. Pelvipro helps us gain a feeling of control over the back pain. Be it a huge spasm or a tiny tweak, if you have long term back pain, either can be the trigger cause this arousal.
We love when our patients and now online customers, relay their first experience of this control, when they begin to use Pelvipro.
