I believe it is important for people living with chronic pain to understand that sometimes what you most fear your actually create.  When you live with chronic pain you hurt.  Doing certain things can make you hurt worse.  So you come to believe that these things will always cause you to hurt.   In other words, you associate those things with pain.  You believe that every time you do those things, you will have pain.  Because you believe that you are going to hurt, you can actually activate the physiological pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt.  This is called anticipatory pain. 

Once the physical pain system is activated, the anticipatory pain reaction can actually make your pain symptoms worse.  Whenever you feel the pain, you interpret it in a way that makes it worse.  You start thinking about the pain in a way that actually makes it worse.  You tell yourself that the pain is “awful and terrible,” and that “I can’t handle the pain.”  You convince yourself that “it’s hopeless, I’ll always hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” 

This way of thinking causes you to develop emotional reactions that further intensify or amplify the pain response.  The increased perception of pain causes you to keep changing your behavior in ways that create even more unnecessary limitations and more emotional discomfort.  This can make you feel trapped in a progressive cycle of disability.  If you want to learn how to cope with this problem please download my free article Coping with Anticipatory Pain.

If you want to learn more about chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Publications page to check out my new book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System.  You can also check out our Ariticles page to download my other free articles.