Why do we have pain that appears without any explanation? – GOOD SHAPE

Hey guys! Essentially, we can say that we have two types of pains or injuries. Those we know the causes and those we have no idea. For example, I’ll start with the first one. She has a known cause. It could come from a car accident, a fall from a horse, a slip, a tackle from behind on Thursday football. We call these fatal injuries, accidents. Something almost inevitable.

But there is another type of injury. The one that comes out of nowhere. You did everything you always do, but for some reason today, you woke up with your back hurting. Or, you bend down to grab a pan under the sink and your knees give out. Or, you try to pick up a book from the top of the shelf and your shoulders scream in pain.

You don’t know why it hurts, since the routine has not changed. However, our brain always tries to find an explanation. And so many theories are born. I think I slept badly. It must be the way I carried the bag. I sat for a long time. Is cold. We try to find a way to explain the inexplicable and any answer that makes a minimum of sense is readily accepted. Even if it doesn’t make that much sense. Want to see? Let’s analyze these responses.

I think I slept badly. No, you didn’t sleep badly. You’ve been sleeping the same way for 40 years and you’ve never felt a thing. Furthermore, there is no wrong way to sleep (except for the economy class seat). Something that is wrong is always wrong and it works for everyone. For example: jumping headfirst from the 10th floor of a building. Now this is a wrong way to pick up the food that was left at the entrance by the delivery person. And it’s wrong for everyone. No one escapes unscathed. Now sleeping on your stomach, side or down, no. Millions of people do this daily and feel nothing. Therefore, we cannot say that some of these positions are wrong. You may not even be able to sleep well like this, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Another hypothesis was that you sat for a long time. But from the first day of 1st grade school, you’ve been sitting for hours. Millions of people spend hours sitting down every day. Why did today hurt and it never hurt before?

Maybe the way you carry your purse? Well, what I wrote above applies to the bag too. You always carry it the same way. The truth is, you could hazard a guess at whatever you did yesterday as an explanation. And for all it would serve the observation that you always do it that way, so that wouldn’t explain why this time it didn’t work.

One thing in common about these pains that appear out of nowhere it’s the fact that as they come, so they go. Two days later you wake up much better and you don’t even pay attention to the fact that you slept the same way, but even so you keep saying that that pain was born because you slept the wrong way.

However, unbeknownst to you, a cycle has begun here. A few days later the pain returns. And after a little longer than the last time, she leaves. A few days later it appears and lasts for a week. And so it goes on until she never leaves again. And because you believe it was because you slept wrong, you “police yourself” to sleep in another position that you don’t like at all, that you don’t feel comfortable with and still the pain doesn’t go away. From now on, you no longer move naturally, your movements become harder, robotic and fearful. This cycle makes you move less and less and, with that, the pain increases and generates another cycle of fear, tense and robotic movements, less movements and more pain. I call it negative spiral.

But then, what caused such pains? To understand this we must always understand the whole. Who we are? Three-dimensional beings of body, mind and spirit. They all harmonize with each other and cannot live in isolation. The body affects the mind and spirit and vice versa. So back pain can be caused by the body, the mind and the spirit, and it’s even more likely that it’s all three. The human being is so complex that today we know, at most, 15% of how it works, which means that we don’t know 85%.

As most of it is in the realm of the unknown, we need to create theories to be able to explain what happens. A theory is not an absolute truth, but an attempt to explain a phenomenon. When you say you think you slept badly, you are somehow creating a theory. A fragile theory, but a theory nonetheless. So I created a theory to explain this pain without an apparent cause. I call this global performance theory of being.

For me, as I said in this column The Language of Pain, pain is communication. Whenever something is wrong the body lets us know through pain. So if your back is hurting, that’s information. And if there’s nothing we can attribute to it, it’s because this pain is not the result of something very specific, but rather a sum of many factors in body, mind and spirit.

To understand this theory, let’s imagine this complex being at its best performance. In other words, 100% performance. Over time we lose performance. Be it due to a sedentary lifestyle, aging, lifestyle, food, stress, compensation, medication, drugs or even the misfortunes of life. All these and many other factors that I haven’t listed, some due to time and others certainly due to lack of knowledge (we don’t know 85% of the body’s function), negatively influence performance and will, little by little, bring down our performance.

Until at some point it drops so much that our lower back is unable to cope with its task and operates poorly. Not because of her fault, but because in this low performance that her body is in, she doesn’t have the resources to do her job. And how will she let you know? If you said pain, you’re right. So we can say that the lower back is not to blame for back pain, but that it is a victim. She is the result of a performance that collapsed over time. This explains why today you have pain that you didn’t have yesterday, even doing everything you’ve always done. Doing what he does was, little by little, taking down his performance.

Let’s understand this in practice. you woke up with back pain. If you think it was because you slept badly, what solution can you give? Sleep differently. But you can’t because, let’s face it, everyone has a position that they like to sleep the most. And once you actually sleep, your body tends to go back to that position. And even if it doesn’t come back, it’s possible you’ll still have pain, because changing your sleeping position doesn’t affect the other variables.

But we can also look at it from the perspective of overall performance of the being. In this case, we see a person who has some variables with low performance. For example, hip flexion. This person spends all day sitting. However, because she has little hip flexion and shortening of the muscle chains in the back of her body, she sits more on her lower back than on her buttocks. What overloads the lumbar. To help, he has a very stressful job and just today he had a sequence of meetings that didn’t even allow for a break to drink a glass of water and stretch his knees.

At the end of the day you even have a headache. On the way home, she stops by the drive-thru of a diner and orders a bacon-laden hamburger and a bucket of soda. She comes home and still drinks her whiskey, after all, nobody is made of iron. Already quite anesthetized, she goes to sleep, but sleep doesn’t come, because her head is still thinking about today’s and tomorrow’s meetings. Worried about the time, she takes a relaxant and an anxiolytic to fall asleep and sleeps like a log. The heavy sleep. It stays all night in the same position. Something that if sleep was light, coming from a healthy life, a balanced diet and no drugs or alcohol to sleep, would not have happened.

In a normal sleep, we change positions from time to time, as soon as the body is stressed from this position. However, in this artificially altered sleep we stayed in the same position for a long time. This position that after some time generates some tension in the lower back, which was already tired of having sat for many hours. Soon, when waking up, the lower back no longer wakes up 100%. His performance was not recovered by a restorative night. So today she has less condition than yesterday. And she will have a similar day. It will probably arrive at the end of the day worse than yesterday. And so on. Until, for all these reasons, the lower back is unable to cope with its tasks, it spends the day under enormous tension and complains in the form of pain.

And she stays like that for a couple of days, until the next day her team wins the derby against her biggest rival. You went out with crush and ate at a Japanese restaurant. Didn’t drink. He had a lighter day at work and all of this contributes to an increase in his overall performance. That day you don’t feel the pain. Until two days later, when the pain appears. Because neither the rise nor the fall in performance is linear, as it is influenced by several factors. However, given the lifestyle and everything related to it and also its ability to move, the average of this performance is upwards or downwards. And soon the pain won’t go away. Blaming the sleeping position now doesn’t make sense anymore, does it?

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

Live in harmony of body, mind and spirit. As a part affects the whole, any performance gain will generate a better perception. In this specific example, we could improve hip flexion, so that the lower back does not wear out so much throughout the day at work sitting down. We could meditate to get in touch with ourselves and the universe, thus having a better relationship with our stress. Practicing an activity like Jiu-Jitsu, where you would spend that military energy that you accumulated in your day to day with the boss, which you often avoid saying what you think. We could improve our diet, read a good book before bed, sleep earlier, drink more water. Participate in social work to understand that you are privileged and be more grateful, thus improving your relationship with the world around you.

That is, you can make an infinite number of possibilities for the spiral to invert and now be positive. This what I call Theory of the Global Performance of the Being. Since I have based my life and my work with my students in this way, the results have been infinitely better and that is why I am able to solve problems that the students took years without solving in a few weeks, because we take all the complexity of this being into account. And when we harmonize with the whole and the spiral becomes positive, time now works in our favor. And as a bonus you even get a better world. That world was always there, but caught in its downward spiral you couldn’t see it. It’s your choice. The path is made by walking. Up or down. Because from this life, what we need is to leave better than we entered, in body, mind and spirit.

That’s all

samorai