Body Scan for Chronic Pain
The Body Scan Exercise is an effective way to cope with chronic pain. Learn how to do it at home to both take a break from pain and retrain your brain to loosen the strong focus on your pain. Chronic pain creates more subjective misery when the brain can’t ignore the pain. This increases the focus on the pain to the exclusion of other bodily sensations in parts of the body where you don’t feel pain. The Body Scan can reverse that negative effect.
Pain functions to let us know that something is wrong. Our brain and nervous system are designed to respond to pain, not just to feel it. This means that our nerves don’t just transmit pain signals like a wire transmits power to a circuit to light a lightbulb. We are much more complex than that. Our brain is wired to cause us to quickly and powerfully respond to a pain signal. So, the process of the creation of the pain experience is called nociception.
Because our brains want us to respond to pain and not just feel it, the pain signal can become enlarged in regard to the relative focus compared to other perceptions. This happens with acute and chronic pain.
For example, I once hit my thumb while trying to drive a nail into the wall to hang a picture. It instantly hurt. For the next twenty minutes, I couldn’t ignore my throbbing thumb. If nerves were simply like electrical wires to a light bulb, I would say that the intense pain was because there simply was so much pain. But, the process of co-creation of the pain experience through nociception means that a better explanation is: my brain wanted me to fix the injury to my thumb (or prevent more injury) and so had blown up the focus on my thumb for a period of time. You could think of it as turning up the volume on one channel (my thumb) and simultaneously turning down the volume on all other channels (everything other than my thumb).
This is not too much of a problem for a minor injury as happened with my thumb. In a relatively short period of time, the pain experience will subside and my brain will go back to paying more wide-ranging attention to all the parts of my universe that aren’t my thumb. But, this becomes a more challenging issue when we experience chronic pain.
The same process of nociception described above happens with chronic pain. The brain increases the volume of the pain signal and decreases everything else. The effect of that is to worsen the subjective misery of the pain. And, over time, this sustained increase focus can lead to more overall pain.
These brain changes that occur through the brain adapting to a sustained pain experience involve parts of the brain and endocrine system that also process stress and emotions. This is why pain causes stress and elevated stress can make subjective pain worse. Similarly, pain induces challenging emotional states (frustration, sadness, and anger) and being in a challenged emotional state will make subjective pain worse. This is part of the explanation for why we see increased rates of anxiety and depression in sufferers of chronic pain.
The Body Scan is a way to take a break from the increased pain focus.
Even better: it can help reverse those brain changes that maintain it!
How To Practice The Body Scan
Lie down face up in a room with little noise and distractions and with the lights turned down
Close your eyes
Listen to the audio of the video below
Don’t worry about trying to relax though you likely will feel more relaxed while performing The Body Scan
Try to be in a state of open awareness free from judgments about any particular sensation or body part
When judgments arise, notice them, then let go of them
Breathe in a relaxed, normal way and don’t try to change your breath
Just be aware of each body part in turn as guided by the video
Be aware of the parts of your body that aren’t feeling pain along with the parts that are
Jon
Check out my video on this topic below:
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Learn about:
The stress response
How chronic stress causes stress
How mindfulness helps with stress & pain