Labelling and healthcare professional’s opinions of your pain will directly influence your minds perception of your pain and can in many circumstances, alter your mind’s perception of your pain.
Let me explain;
If you are told by your GP that you are feeling more pain than normal for your condition and therefore you must have a low pain threshold, your mind will process this information and change the way in which it interprets your pain. As a direct consequence of this your mind can actually manifest more pain than you felt before.
You will by now have gathered that your mind is the one defining influence of how you feel pain.
You, through your consciousness, control your mind so it stands to reason that you have an element of control over the pain you are feeling. I’m sure that if you have pain it won’t feel like you have any influence at all over the pain you are living with, but let me give you just a few examples of how people can directly and ‘consciously’ influence their mind to either reduce or enhance their pain;
- There are several religious sects in India who practice mind control (the conscious control of their mind) as part of their religion. They are trained to be able to make their mind perceive things in a way it wouldn’t normally see. One of these ways is how they experience pain. They commonly display this mind control ability by walking on red hot coals. You may have seen this type of thing on TV documentaries and it is often described as a magic trick or an illusion, but I can assure you these people are actually walking with bare feet on red hot coals. Your first reaction to witnessing this will most likely be the same as mine. “How is this possible?”
It is possible and only possible because the person has told their mind that there is no pain and in fact they have gone one step further to say there is no such ‘thing’ as pain. Now that may seem ridiculous or quite simply impossible to you or I, as we have had 1st hand experience of pain, but it is entirely possible with the right training to convince the mind that pain does not exist.
- Another extreme demonstration of this unique ability to train the mind can often be seen on magical entertainment programmes or TV shows that show bizarre talents. During one of these types of programme I witnessed a man taking a large spike and piercing his cheek with it and then placing it through his face like a large safety pin. This was an event that was heavily scrutinized for any type of optical illusion and verified that in fact this man did manage this feat.
- Probably the most common and ‘down to earth’ example of how we can consciously switch our mind off to pain is in people with needle phobias. A person with a needle phobia would rather do almost anything else but endure an injection. However injections are necessary in some circumstances such as dental treatment. Most people with needle phobias would rather endure the pain of having a dentist’s drill boring through their tooth, hitting every single nerve as it goes down to the root, rather than have a local anesthetic injection. Nerve pain is excruciating and when a raw nerve is touched the body jumps in an involuntary reaction. You can imagine that it is not very clever to be sitting in a dentist’s chair with a drill in your mouth whilst continually jumping. How then does the needle phobic get over this? Quite simply they ‘tell’ their mind that the pain will not be as bad as the injection. That enduring the injection will be worse than any pain they may feel. They absolutely convince their mind of this fact over and over “the pain won’t be that bad” and so the mind alters it’s perception of this painful experience so that when they get in the dentist’s chair they actually do feel very little pain.
The next blog in this series will follow soon so please check later
