Did you know that 20.4% of American adults suffered from chronic pain in 2019 and 7.4% of adults had chronic pain that frequently limited their life and work activities? Chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts for 3 to 6 months or longer and there are many causes of chronic pain.
Many chronic body pain sufferers are on long-term medications that help alleviate and manage their chronic pain. Are you suffering from chronic pain as well and looking for some alternative ways to manage your chronic pain issue?
Keep reading as we share 7 different solutions that can help you manage chronic pain effectively.
1. Cold and Heat
Depending on the reason for your chronic pain, you could try alternating cold and heat therapy on the affected area or joint to see if that helps alleviate the pain.
You can create your own homemade hot and cold packs, or if you have a physiotherapist or chiropractor that you are seeing, you could ask them for their versions of the treatments. These will penetrate deeper into your tissue and work faster.
If you are feeling brave, you could even take alternating cold and hot showers to see if that helps your chronic pain issue.
2. Yoga
You might not think of yoga as a pain-relieving method, but it has great therapeutic benefits when it comes to managing chronic pain. Due to the incorporation of breath control, meditation, and gentle movements, your muscles get stretched and strengthened without much agitation or force. This can help you manage pain related to arthritis, headaches, or any injuries you might have.
Of course, if you are not used to yoga, go slow at first. Don’t do a Bikram hot yoga class from the get-go, because it might be too intense for you and cause you to quit before you even start. A long-term yoga practice will do wonders for your body, so go about it in a manner that allows you to stick to your practice for a long time to come.
3. Mindfulness
When you are in one of your chronic pain bouts, your reptilian brain is in control (i.e., your instinctual self), and it activates the fight-or-flight response quite strongly. This means that your mind is going to be in stress mode, making your chronic pain seem worse than it is.
With practices like mindfulness, breath control (pranayama), and meditation, you can tamp down on that instinctual self and cut off the fight-or-flight response (or reduce it significantly), which will allow you to go beyond the pain to what lies ahead.
You can stop focusing so much on the pain and get more grounded in your body’s experience, all of which have positive benefits on your mind-body connection.
4. Stem Cell Therapy
This might be a surprising addition to the list, but there are many companies out there that are using PRP cells and/or stem cells to help heal injuries and reduce chronic pain. They deliver these healing cells directly to the site of the injury, helping to fix the original damage, and improve body function. Check out National Stem Cell Clinic for details on their stem cell shoulder treatment.
5. Massage
Therapeutic massage isn’t just for stress relief or a luxury spa treatment. It’s much more than that, especially if you are working with an experienced masseuse who knows about chronic pain and its tenets. Massage can help work out any kinks you might have in your injured tissue or joints, and relieve stress and anxiety about your pain.
It will also introduce a ‘competing sensation’ that will allow you to focus on something other than your pain for an hour or more, and could even override pain signals by distracting you.
6. Music Therapy
Studies have proven that classical music works well to reduce pain during and after surgery and after childbirth. You could even use other forms of music, of course, but classical music seems to work best in this form of therapy. Also, there’s no harm in putting on some of your favorite tunes and letting your mind wander to faraway places, reducing your focus on your body and pain.
7. Laughter Therapy
If you have been dealing with chronic pain for a long while now, you might think that you don’t have much to laugh about. And that could be true.
But laughter therapy (also known as humor therapy) has been shown to help relieve pain and reduce stress. And it can improve the sense of wellbeing in a person, especially if they are dealing with serious diseases involving a lot of chronic pain.
It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate either. You could put on a bunch of comedies on TV and laugh your heart out. Or you could go to a comedy show in the city.
Reading funny books, playing games with your family, or going to clown shows are all options to consider.
You could make it more formal by going to laughter yoga or laughter therapy classes where they use a wide variety of laughter exercises to help you burst out into more of those healing belly laughs. Who couldn’t do with more of those?
Chronic Body Pain Can Be Debilitating and Reduce Your Life Satisfaction
There’s no doubt that chronic body pain isn’t something you can just ignore. It affects every single aspect of your life from your family life, work-life, to your overall life satisfaction.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t myriad solutions out there that can help you alleviate and even reduce your chronic pain so you can start enjoying life again. Maybe you can even start laughing again!
If you found this article enlightening, we are glad. There are many more interesting and useful articles on our website, so please keep browsing.
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