Joanne Smith explains how harsh self-criticism and perfectionism can amplify chronic pain and neuroplastic symptoms. She shares her own experience as someone who drove herself relentlessly, then shows how recognizing these self-sabotaging patterns makes them easy to stop.
mean is giving yourself a hard time and saying you should be doing better and this is not working and give up, why are you even bothering, to me is not a sign of safety. It's just an even bigger sign of danger. And if anything, that can escalate things to an even more amplified, higher, higher level. I've experienced that too because I was the queen At giving myself a hard time and not being good enough. And always working above and beyond and being a person that goes way above and beyond, because that's just another kind of personality trait that's massively associated with chronic pain and chronic symptoms, neuroplastic symptoms. And you don't need to change your personality, but bringing awareness and knowing is— once you've got that knowing and that awareness and understanding, it's actually really easy. Nothing to do, because all of a sudden when you know it, it's like, ah, well, I'm not going to do that anymore, because why would I do something that's hurting?
