How Stress Affects Your Pain
Often times we look to treatments or exercise rehabilitation to reduce pain. You might not be able to change the fact that most clinics and gyms are closed. You may have gotten onto zoom to attend an exercise class. There are other considerations that you can be doing for yourself while you can’t access these treatments. Particularly, I would like to discuss how stress can compound inflammation and heighten your pain.
Let’s get to some of the basics so you can see how stress and increased pain are linked. The body is complex - & actually fascinating. You may have been learning lately about how stress can affect your immune system’s response. Well so can stress affect how you experience pain.
When people are stressed their experience of pain becomes more intense and thwarts recovery. Take for example two people that get an ankle sprain. One person puts their pain on the pain scale at a 3, while the other person puts their pain at a 10. The person at a 10 may have compounding factors that bring them to that higher level of perception. You may have experienced something similar that if you have had a bad night’s sleep you dread the following day, knowing that you will be in worse pain.
So here’s the biochemistry of it all. When you are in pain - the hypothalamus - pituitary - adrenal (HPA) axis gets stimulated resulting in raised cortisol levels. This hormone, cortisol, is your innate anti-inflammatory.
The thing is that pain isn’t the only thing that stimulates this HPA axis - so do many other stressors on our body. Things that are a threat to our survival are things that activate the HPA axis. These could be low blood sugar, emotional stress, family stress, food sensitivities, to name a few.
Even removing some of the controllable stressors can have a big impact on your overall pain. Eating regularly. Discovering and removing food sensitivities. Practicing gratitude to reduce emotional stress. Take a peak at my previous blog post for more ideas on coping strategies:
Strategies for Coping with Stress & Anxiety
The HPA axis is essential to survival. We are hardwired this way to handle what comes at us. But we aren’t quite hardwired to be bombarded by repeated stressful events. That’s when these prolonged attacks are a cost to us. THE HPA axis becomes thrown off its gears and begin to over or under react to stimuli.
So to bring it back to your pain. Your body’s cortisol is used to reduce inflammation - to bring your pain levels down. But if the HPA axis is off kilter - it may over or under react — leading to a higher perception of muscle or joint pain.
It may be time to query how stress is affecting your physical body if you are experiencing headaches, lightheadedness, irritability, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance. There are many other symptoms to list when it comes to stress based symptoms. I highlight these typical ones as I feel the above would affect your energy levels to get your workouts done & prevent you from getting to a pain free life.
I find that when my patients tonify their HPA axis function, they respond better to Regenerative Injection Therapies and typically are quicker to be pain free. While you are at home if you would like to learn more about your adrenal function, please contact me for a consultation. Through specific questioning and at times cortisol testing, I can determine how you are functioning in the midst of stress. Natural medicine has many options to help your body to adapt to stressful situations, thereby improving your cortisol response in the midst of pain.
I am offering video and phone telemedicine appointments to help you cope with stress & reduce pain so that you can stay on track whilst staying at home.
