I learned a long time ago that what we expect is usually what we get. Now this can be both beneficial and harmful. When it comes to feeling pain and obtaining effective pain management it is crucial to understand the role of anticipatory pain. It has both biological and psychological components.

On the biological side, the cascade of effects from a pain sensation occurs on many levels and involves a variety of different areas within the nervous system. As a result, a wide variety of nervous system chemicals are produced and dumped into the blood while other brain chemicals are rapidly absorbed or depleted. Pain doesn’t just hurt. It changes the most basic neurophysiological processes.

On the psychological side, anticipation of an expected pain level can influence the degree to which you experience your pain. In some cases, when your anticipatory level of pain expectation is lowered, your brain responds by influencing special neurons. This renders your brain less responsive to an incoming pain signal and your sensation of pain decreases. This is the rationale for utilizing biofeedback and meditation as pain control methods. In any event, both 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 on your body.

Unfortunately this phenomenon can also worsen your perception of pain. 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 activate the physiological pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt. This is called anticipatory pain. You expect that something will make you hurt. That in turn activates the physiological pain system. This makes you start hurting even before you begin doing whatever it is that you believe will cause you to hurt. All you have to do is to start thinking about doing that thing.

To learn how to address anticipatory pain in a positive way please check out my article Coping with Anticipatory Pain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.