# Psychological + Stress ##### Untangling Pain --- ![](https://youtu.be/lD8Ur1f46bw) --- ## tl;dr **Psychological or mind stuff** - Stress, emotions, thoughts and beliefs, and past experiences → Not really separate → everything is connected **Stress and pain** - Strong link between stress, anxiety, and chronic musculoskeletal pain - Includes neck, arm pain, headaches - Applies to any pain condition - Stress can impact sleep, which increases pain, and pain affects sleep - Creates a cycle, but it doesn’t have to stay that way **Recognising and validating stress** - Being “stressed” doesn’t have to mean huge life pressures - Even slight overwhelm matters and needs addressing **Early stress and trauma** - Early life stress can link to chronic pain later - Not a guarantee, but worth acknowledging - Big T or little t trauma → it’s your story and a possible puzzle piece **Stress as DIM or SIM** - Stress is mostly a SIM - Can be beneficial for growth - But if it makes your body feel in danger, it needs attention --- ## Transcript On to the psychological part. Now, the psychological or the mind stuff that I'm going to cover is stress, emotions, thoughts and beliefs, and past experiences. So again, there's going to be a number of other different factors that you could put into this as well, but these are how I'm going to include them. Again, although I have broken these down into separate areas, as always, they're not separate really, they're really not. Everything is connected, everything. We're going to start off with stress. So psychological stress and anxiety are strongly associated with pain, especially chronic musculoskeletal pain disorders. Including neck and arm pain and headaches and the research shows that reducing stress and having stress reduction interventions may help with chronic pain. So although I've just mentioned those chronic pain disorders, it doesn't mean that if you have a different pain disorder that it's not included, trust me. If you're in pain, this is included. When it comes to stress, obviously this can have an impact on our sleep, which I've already mentioned. If you're stressed then you're not going to sleep. And honestly, this can then increase pain. And obviously, if we're in pain, that this can then cause problems with sleep. And then we start stressing over it. So it can be a massive circle, this cycle that we're stuck in. But it doesn't have to be the case. I think sometimes just recognising that we're stressed and I actually wonder if the problem is the word stressed itself because quite often we think that being stressed needs to be some massive thing, we can only be stressed if we are looking after somebody else or if we have four jobs, or if we have, three kids that we need to get to all different schools, We don't think that, sometimes we don't think we deserve to be classed as stressed. But that's not always the case. If you're feeling even slightly overwhelmed, if you feel something is off, then this is something that needs addressing. Another thing I've found when I was doing the research was that psychological stress early on in life can actually be a factor for chronic pain conditions later in life. Now, that doesn't mean that you are guaranteed to have chronic pain if you have stress early on in life, or that you must have had stress early on in your life if you have chronic pain now. But just know that there is a link there and if this is the case for you, then working through your experiences, your trauma, no matter how big or small it could be a big T trauma or it could be a  little t trauma, it's your story, but this could be another piece of the puzzle. Again, with regards to stress, this is something that we could work on. So as with whether this stress is a DIM or a SIM, I think it's pretty much a SIM. That said stress is different for everybody. Some stress can be really beneficial. It can push us out of our comfort zone. That's how we actually grow is through stress but at the same time this stress that I'm talking about here, this is probably making your body feel in danger. It feels like it's a threat to you as a person so this definitely needs looking at. --- Next lesson → [[Untangling Pain – Module 2 Lesson 08|next lesson]] %% - [[Psychological stress and anxiety are strongly associated with pain]] - [[Stress and Sleep]] - [[Sometimes just recognising that we’re stressed helps]] - [[Psychological stress early on in life can actually be a factor for chronic pain conditions later in life]] - [[Stress as a DIM or SIM]]