Joanne Smith explains how pushing hard to recover from physical problems can backfire: intense exercise sends danger signals to your nervous system, which responds with pain, fatigue, and muscle tension to protect you. Real recovery starts when your brain feels safe enough to relax its guard.
But 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. So it, it doesn't distinguish between A genuine legitimate physical threat or an imagined threat, if your brain thinks you're in danger, it will increase the protection. And one of the most amazing ways to do that is to alert you through protection, which could be pain. Pain is protection. It could be fatigue. It could be muscle tension, tight muscles. It could be avoidance, overthinking, hypervigilance. And so on. So recovery does begin, in my mind, um, when we can help the brain to gently realize that you are actually safe.
