Now does this mean that all the time you have been reading I have been “leading you up the garden path” and raising your hopes of a pain free existence only to cruelly dash those hopes away by saying “sorry there is no help or hope for you”? No it doesn’t mean that and as an ex chronic pain sufferer myself there really would be no reason to, or way, that I would ever do that.
What I am saying is that the mind is so full of absolute potential and is so powerful that it is capable of incredibly, amazing, wondrous, unimaginable things. And if you harness just a little bit of it in the right way it can make a ‘whole lot of difference’ to the way in which your pain controls your life.
It is a widely known fact that human beings only use 10% of their brain. What is less known is that you have on average 60,000 thoughts a day, everyday. 90% of those thoughts are negative. That means that 90% of the 10% of your brain that you do use is devoted to thinking about ‘bad’ or ‘not nice’ things.
Let me explain this a little bit more….
The media is full of negative images and stories. Each day we pick up our newspaper or turn on the TV or Radio news and listen to the atrocities that occur each day, the USA hurricane, terrorist attacks, a family dying in a house fire, another famine crisis in Africa. How can you not be affected by all this ‘bad news?’ It gets you down and is interpreted in your mind as a negative thought. You can’t be blamed for this, it is not easy to look at the world we live in today and not be disheartened by the events we hear about and witness.
Human nature is to always look for a negative before a positive. For example when you buy something and get it home, you unwrap it and the first thing that comes to mind about it is that it isn’t quite what you expected it to be. Maybe it’s smaller than you thought or the colour isn’t quite right. Automatically you are conditioned, through history and social upbringing to see the ‘faults’ before you recognize the positive attributes of the item. Of course there must be many positives to whatever it was you bought or you wouldn’t have bought it in the first place, but for a short period of time you can’t see them because all you see are the negatives.
Now the negative aspects will diminish as you start to use the item and remember all the things you liked about it when you saw it in the shop, OR you might find that it doesn’t live up to expectations because the negative aspects prey too heavily on your mind until you return it to the shop as unsuitable.
There is nothing wrong with this behaviour. It is perfectly natural. It quite clearly demonstrates how focused we are on the negatives in life. We are so easily swayed away from seeing the good in almost everything around us and that most certainly is our ‘human nature.’
If I equate this ‘90% negative thoughts’ into the context of pain, you will see how it is possible for you to exert some control over your pain.
The next installment will arrive soon
