Ascending pain signals, coming from the point of injury to the brain, and descending nerve pathways, signals from the brain to the point of injury, will influence or modify the effects of pain on your body.

Some of these ascending signals simply report the presence of pain (I hurt or I don’t hurt). Other signals report the intensity of the pain (It hurts a little or it hurts a lot). Still other pain signals report the location of the pain (My stomach hurts) or whether the pain is associated with an internal or external injury (My stomach hurts deep in my gut, or the skin on my stomach hurts). Other pain signals report the type of pain (It burns or it throbs).

All of these different pain signals are transmitted into the spinal cord through nerve pathways to the hypothalamus section of the brain. There the brain transmits the pain signal information to other specialized pain neurons, which in turn sends the information (descending signals) to different areas in the brain.

One area that gets the message is your limbic system—this is the emotional center of the brain. It leads to a feeling or emotional response. Another signal goes to your frontal lobes—this is the cognition/thinking center of the brain. It leads to thoughts or judgments about your pain, including 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 makes it worse. You tell yourself that the pain is awful and terrible, and think, I can’t handle the pain. You convince yourself, It’s hopeless, I’ll always hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s very important to remember that when you have pain, there are three components to that pain:

(1) Biological

(2) Psychological/Emotional

(3) Social/Cultural

All three components need to be treated, but the treatment plan for each differs. An effective medication management plan coupled with nonpharmacological interventions is the best approach for the biological pain symptoms.

However, using medication for the psychological/emotional symptoms is like having an infected cut on your hand and the only thing you do for it is find a color-coordinated bandage and slap it on. Using medication for the psychological/emotional symptoms puts you at risk for experiencing negative side effects from your medication, including potential addiction problems.

The good news is there are ways you can learn to identify and cope with your psychological/emotional symptoms. It is also important to identify any social and/or cultural beliefs/biases that could potentially sabotage an effective pain management plan.

To learn more about the importance of understanding chronic pain please read my article Chronic Pain and the Hijacked Brain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain or living with chronic pain yourself and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing the pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression or addiction effectively please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to listen to this interview.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.