When most people think of stress it is usually in the context of it being a problem. While this is often the case there are also positive aspects to stress.  We need stress to motivate us and help us deal with life on life’s terms. Stress also increases our energy and fuels the fight, flight, or freeze reaction. 

For someone living with chronic pain, stress can intensify their experience of pain.  When the person also has prescription drug addiction the problem is even worse. The stress response is a combination of biological psychological and behavioral components.  Stress can also be an amplifier for chronic pain.  It is important to teach your patients about the connection between stress levels and their pain symptoms, as well as understanding that good stress management can also decrease their suffering. 

Physically, chronic pain increases stress levels and drains physical energy, while psychologically it affects people’s ability to think clearly, logically and rationally, as well as to effectively manage their feelings or emotions.  Remember that in most cases if your patients can learn to lower their stress levels, they will also experience a decrease in their perception of pain.

Of course before patients learn to manage their stress they need to be familiar with ways to assess their level of stress.  It is important to teach them how to accurately self-assess their levels of stress and then how to develop some simple but effective stress management tools. 

To learn more about how to identify stress and the importance of stress management please check out my article The Stress Pain Connection 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 and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their 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 recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the November 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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.