Joanne Smith explains why chronic pain persists: aggressive rehab and constant searching for perfect treatments send danger signals to your nervous system, keeping it on high alert. Recovery works better when you start with safety messages instead.
So whether you're recovering from an injury that's become, um, lasted, the pain's lasted longer than the expectation for that particular injury, uh, usually if it's lasted more than 3 months or longer, whether you are living with a diagnosis that you may have been given by medicine, for example fibromyalgia, which is what I was diagnosed with, it could be chronic fatigue syndrome, it could be whatever it is, if you're in a situation where you're feeling like you can't trust your body, you're feeling like you're never going to get out of this, you're feeling like, I'm never going to get well, anything like that, you can end up being in a situation where you spend a lot of time looking for what you think might be the perfect rehab kind of program or recovery program or special supplements or treatments, and those things have got their place, But if you have got a nervous system that is constantly receiving the opposite to what I want it to receive in this session, so the opposite being messages of danger, we're looking about recovery begins with messages of safety, so what's the opposite? Danger. We don't want messages of danger. So if you are in a situation where you're working really hard to fix something and you're doing all these exercise regimes and training plans and all of these things, that could be an unintentional message of danger. Your body could stay on high alert, and the nervous system has just one job, and the one job is to keep you safe, keep you alive.
