Stop Telling Your Story: How to Derail the Thought-Pain Cycle

By Steve Hefferon, CMT, PTA

Today what I want to say to you is… Stop telling your story. Stop letting subconscious influences act on your body and cause you pain. Perhaps you wonder, How can my mind create pain in my body? It's very simple. Let's give an example.

Say you are stressed out about your job, and that stress creates physical tension in your muscles. This tension can, one, irritate nerves and create pain. Two, tension can restrict blood flow, and thus create pain through lack of oxygen. And guess what? It just may happen to be pain in your lower back. So now you go to the doctor, and the doctor diagnoses, for example, a herniated disc. Of course, this is not caused solely by the stress of your job. It is due to all the various tensions going on in your daily life. But even so, now you have been told you have a herniated disc, and you experience pain.

Psychologists report that we have about 50,000 thoughts a day. The trouble is we have the same 50,000 thoughts every day. We actually get addicted to our negative thoughts and negative emotions, and they influence our subconscious minds. Now here is the problem. Your ego always wants to be right. You have pain, and you have been given a diagnosis, so you tell your story about the diagnosis, and thus you have to have pain. We call that Inevitability Thought.

"I had pain yesterday, so I have to feel pain today." We create these thoughts by telling our story. We get stuck in a cycle. But you can cease being limited by your negative emotions by just stopping worrying. It's been said only 5% of what we worry about actually comes true. Yet we think worrying can make it better. Actually, worrying is the worst thing you can do. Start conditioning your mind to realize that your past doesn't have to influence your future.

So here are a couple little tricks I want you to try. First, stop using the word "pain" and start using the word "sensation." Say, "I feel a sensation," instead of, "I have pain all the time." Second: create an affirmation. Repeat it a couple times a day. "I want to be pain-free before my wedding, my vacation, by spring." Take this affirmation and make it a goal. Write it down, put it on paper. From now on, treat your body as a whole and stop worrying about your diagnosis.

Focus your energies on the things you know you can change. This is what our Lose the Back Pain System is all about. You can't change your diagnosis, so stop thinking about it. You definitely can make your body stronger and eliminate chronic irritants that cause your symptoms. You can live with your condition and feel no pain, or much less pain, if you will address the physical, emotional and nutritional needs of your body as a whole and, in this way, allow your body to heal itself.

I'll leave you with this final thought. Our bodies are self-healing organisms. All you have to do is eliminate the stress and give the body what it needs, and you can live a pain-free life. So what do you say? Stop telling your story!