I’ve been living with my chronic pain condition for over 25 years and have learned that pain flare ups are inevitable for me.  I woke up this morning with a major pain flare up and was forced once again to “practice what I preached” and had to implement my own pain flare up plan.  As I did this I began thinking that this would be a good time to once again blog about managing pain flare ups.

There’s an exercise in my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Workbook designed to help people manage pain flare ups. If you’d like to obtain a free copy of this exercise please go to our Contact Us page at http://www.addiction-free.com/contact.html to request my Pain Flare Up Plan and we will be happy to email it to you. In the meantime I want to share very briefly some of that exercise below.

Following are six of the hundreds of possible non-pharmacological (non-medication) ways that other people have learned in order to manage their pain flare-ups.  The important thing to remember is you can intervene in a way that helps you regain effective pain management.  Sometimes the intervention does need to be pain medication, but changing your medication protocols should only be done with your health care provider’s knowledge and permission.

1. Relaxation and Stress Reduction
2. Increasing Activity and Fitness
3. Reducing Emotional Reactivity
4. External Focusing and Distraction
5. Ice and/or Heat
6. Hydrotherapy

To learn more about developing your own chronic pain management plan please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Publications page and check out my book The Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. If you want to learn more about coping with emotional reactivity for chronic pain management flare ups you can find my article Pain Versus Suffering that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

To check out our July Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here.