3 Ways to Manage Chronic Pain at Home  

It’s always amazing to bump into talented and motivated individuals who are willing to share their know-how and personal views to the world. Such a person is Jackie Waters. She is a mother of four beautiful boys, a creator of Hyper Tidy, and one of our readers. A few weeks ago she asked if she could write a piece for us on chronic back pain to help others cope.

And here it is today! Her article is extremely helpful and delighting to read.

Thank you for your tips and proactivity, Jackie!

If you suffer from chronic pain, you may have figured out a few tricks to make it more manageable, such as sleeping on your back, not standing for long periods of time, and making sure that your chairs support your back rather than being too soft. But, if you still are not getting as much relief as you’d like, there are some other ways you can manage your chronic pain at home, and we share a few of them below to help you minimize your pain.

1. Focus on Reducing Your Stress First

Researchers are finding that reducing daily stress puts people in a better position to managing their chronic pain. That’s because stress and pain are closely linked, with each impacting the other and creating a cycle of chronic pain and chronic stress. Dr. Steven Stanos, medical director of the Center for Pain Management at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and assistant professor in the in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University Medical School, reports: “Because pain [is regulated] by the nervous system, the brain is a key player in how we perceive pain. The brain is always trying to inhibit pain signals. But if you’re stressed, simply put, the brain’s ability to filter these pain signals is affected in a bad way and pain can be increased.”

That’s why it’s important to begin managing your pain by getting relief from stress. When you are in a better mental state, you can benefit more from alternative therapies to prescription opioids. Now that we know that even conservative use of prescription opioids can lead to addiction and heroin use and addiction, many people with chronic pain look for alternatives such as reducing stress at home.

2. Begin Practicing Yoga

Many people with chronic pain find it too difficult to get to a gym and participate in intense workouts because they experience too much discomfort. One solution is to begin practicing yoga at home. When you are in the comfort of your own home, you are less likely to feel anxious like you would at the gym, which increases the benefit of the yoga itself. Not only does yoga relieve stress because it calms the mind and forces you to focus on your movement and breathing, but it relieves stress because it is a form of exercise. If you’re looking for the best yoga poses for stress relief, check out this post by Carolyn Gregoire.

Moreover, researchers are finding that “practicing yoga has the opposite effect on the brain as does chronic pain.” Dr. Catherine Bushnell, scientific director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the U.S. National Institutes of Health oversees a program on the role the brain plays in perceiving, modifying, and managing pain. Bushnell and her team conduct research on alternatives to treating chronic pain and found that it is possible to prevent or reverse chronic pain with mind-body practices such as yoga: the practice reduces pain perception.

Specifically, people who practice yoga have a greater pain tolerance and have higher thresholds for pain. The research points to the possibility that yoga may be even more effective at treating chronic pain than prescription opioids.

3. Plant a Garden

Planting and tending to a garden is a surprising way for you to manage your chronic pain at home. While gardening can require some physical activity, there are ways that you can ease the burden on your body and reap the stress-relieving, pain-reducing benefits of working in the dirt with your own vegetables and plants. Gardening is a soothing sensory experience that eases stress and helps you stretch and relax your muscles.

Studies also point to the physical and mental health benefits of gardening that naturally minimize chronic pain. A recent study in the Netherlands found that gardening is more effective at combatting stress than reading. Another study in Norway found that people with depression had significant improvement in their symptoms after three months of gardening. And, gardening provides light to moderate exercise that promotes stretching and is a more manageable form of exercise for people with chronic pain.

If you want to minimize your chronic pain without becoming dependent on prescription opioids, you should reduce your daily stress, begin practicing yoga, and plant a garden.

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What about you? Do you have a health-related story to share? We’d love to post it so that people can learn from your experience and find comfort in knowing that others face similar challenges.

Send your stories to mystory@findmecure.com

Before you go….. Did you know there are 266 clinical trials for back pain around the world? Use the search to find them in seconds.