How to End Your Pain by Retraining Your Brain

Your shoulder doesn’t hurt for no good reason! The nervous system senses a problem and asks you to fix it.

Notice it's your nervous system asking for the change…not your body.

True pain is not something that occurs in the tissues. Rather it’s the summation of your environment and experiences in your past. 

Yes, the past.

If something hurt you before, your nervous system will remember it and won’t readily grant you that movement. Or if something hurt your friend in the past, or if you heard a story that made you perceive something as dangerous, your brain will call upon that information under the right conditions to help ensure your safety. 

Pain is your body’s way of saying this isn’t safe and something needs to change. So does this mean the pain is all in your head when you stub your toe? 

Well…yes and no.

Nociception refers to the transmission of danger signals to the brain by free nerve endings called nociceptors. When they detect a noxious (translation: bad/unpleasant) stimulus, they send a danger signal to the spinal cord that is relayed to the brain. 

To reiterate, they are not sending pain signals, nor are they pain receptors!

They are sending DANGER signals! The brain then weighs the danger signal and determines if it warrants a pain signal and how much of a pain signal. This pain signal in your brain changes your behavior to reduce the threat of the situation. It could mean taking your hand off the hot pan or lifting your foot off that sinister Lego piece.

Things get even more complex in conditions involving chronic pain states when no damage or nociception occurs. These cases prove the complexity of pain. They show that pain and tissue damage are neither synonymous nor necessitate the other. So you need to train your brain to get rid of the pain, and movement is a great way to do this.

The application of pain-free movement in the presence of acute or chronic pain helps mitigate and manage symptoms in both the tissues and the brain. 

At the tissue level, movement aids circulation, improves mobility, and helps with joint and tissue health (only to name a few).

As it relates to the nervous system, movement lights up the brain and helps to create new neural pathways, pathways that are associated with movement patterns that are more efficient and are not accompanied by danger signals. 

Thus movement is medicine, and as such, the dosage is critical. 

The Crossover Symmetry shoulder pain prescription:

• Use low to moderate resistance to provide a stimulus appropriate for the user’s current tissue and nervous system state.
• Modify movements and resistance to recruit the appropriate muscles, decreases compensatory strategies, and activate patterns reflexively – all while allowing the nervous system to feel safe.

 

To quote Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran,

Pain is the opinion of the brain.

Meaning your experience of pain is exactly that: an experience. To end your pain you must first change that experience from a negative to a positive one. Crossover Symmetry is the perfect agent to improve shoulder movement without pain, reducing the danger signals and changing your brain’s perception of the risk.