Joanne Smith explains how chronic pain like back pain and migraines are protective responses your brain learned, not signs of tissue damage. Because your brain learned the pain response through predictive coding, it can unlearn it. She used visualization before sitting to reprogram her brain's response, replacing years of believing she couldn't sit comfortably.
So I can, now that I understand what's happening, I can understand that back pain, leg pain, migraine pain, blurry vision, all these things, they're not damaging. The pain is a protective mechanism, but we also have predictive coding and conditioned responses happening too. And it's quite exciting. Because we can— if the brain can learn a conditioned response, it can learn a different, a new one, a more valuable one, one that we want, you know, an outcome that feels good, i.e., reduction and elimination of chronic pain and chronic symptoms. Like, who wouldn't want to order that if that was available on the menu? I know what I'd be ordering, and I wouldn't be ordering chronic back pain and not being able to sit down and I used to have to spend hours— if I wanted to watch a TV show, I used to stand and hula hoop for the whole 2 hours just to handle watching a film with my family. How crazy is that when you think back? Because I was told that I couldn't ever recover, so I just thought, well, if I want to watch a family movie with my kids, I'm so sorry everyone, I hope you don't mind me standing here hula hooping just to get through it. Anyway, that's, that's just an example from my journey on where I was at. So knowing this stuff, I can reassure myself, I can, even before going to go sit down, I can imagine myself sitting down, like chilling, feeling good.
