And yes, I do mean physical pain.

In my book series, The Everyday Pain Guide, I separate pain triggers into 3 categories: biomechanics, biochemistry and emotions or stress-related factors.  Looking at all three factors is a great way to parse out the cause of your unique aches and pains which can give you a very effective roadmap to relief.

In Volume 1 and 2, I spend a lot of time diving into the biomechanics portion because that is such a big part of what brings people to my chiropractic practice.  But this 5 post series is more about the latter two pain triggers – biochemistry and emotions/stress.  Specifically, I’ll be sharing my own personal experience and revelations during a recent reset that I badly needed.

A big part of Volume 2 Fix the Fire Damage, centers around offering you, the reader, concrete steps towards relief from pain and those three steps are: Release, Retrain, Reinforce in that order.  Before we can retrain and learn new patterns, we need to let go of old ones and uncover or reacquaint ourselves with what our natural inclinations are.  We all have natural rhythms and strengths that, when we tune into and respect, can guide us to our unique optimal wellbeing.  What makes it difficult to tune in, is all the noise in life that can take our attention away from what we need.

Tuning out the noise is the biggest challenge for many of us – these days in particular.  Even if you’re not completely addicted to your phone apps as a way to connect with the world through news feeds, it’s almost impossible to get away from social media and news hype completely.

But the noise that can distract us from ourselves is also what happens inside of our minds as we cope with our day to day demands.  When there are people and jobs that need us and our attention, we naturally put our own needs aside.  The trick is to carve out ways to return to ourselves mindfully and regularly.  When we forget to do this, we burn out and we start requiring a more disciplined reset, which is what I did this Winter and which I’ll share more about in the next post.

The thing about biochemical triggers of pain is that it’s a game of “critical mass” which means factors can pile up gradually without us knowing, and then when the stress of those biochemical triggers reaches the critical mass limit, we can have mysterious sudden pain without warning.  This can feel scary, annoying and confusing because there was no obvious way to see the building-up of biochemical stress.

The other very tricky thing about biochemical triggers of pain is that they can be very unique to each individual.  Your biochemical irritant is not going to be the same as mine and our tolerance levels for certain triggers will not be the same either.  So, the best we can do is to look at some of the universal, known stressors and do our best to preventatively manage them.  But over the years as you tune in and get to know your body and how to read the subtle signs, you will start to build a mental library of information about what your body needs more of and less of.

What the heck is a biochemical pain trigger?

What are we really talking about when we say biochemical triggers of pain?  For starters anything we ingest, inhale or absorb through the skin can change our biochemistry.  When those things that we eat, breathe or soak up, change our chemistry to the point of inflammation – that’s when we run the risk of adding to our potential pain-trigger pile. (you can read much more about this in Volume 1 of The Everyday Pain Guide – Put Out the Fire)

But more surprisingly, how you think and feel and react emotionally to your world can actually change your biochemistry too!  How we deal with stress can change different hormone levels – some of which cause inflammation. 

Conversely, how we manage food and air can impact our brain chemistry and really change our outlook on the world.  When this change is for the worse, we can set off a chain reaction of stress and inflammation in the body and brain.  And before you know it your body is in pain.

The easiest but a simplistic example of this is the pain of a hangover.  When we overindulge in alcohol and rich, salty or sweet foods, we can wake up feeling physical pain and our mood is definitely impacted too.  This is usually short-lived, but the same thing can happen over a long period of time at a low grade level so that we don’t realize anything is off and it can become easy to assume that this is just who we are.

So, when you are in pain and generally bummed out about life or find yourself unable to cope, don’t just sit down and take it.  This is not how things have to be from now on.  Something might be biochemically off balance, and you can always find something to do to change your chemistry. 

Everything that goes in through your mouth, eyes, ears and nose affects your biochemistry.  So, the question becomes: What in your environment can you exert control over?  Sometimes not much but you can usually find at least one thing.  That one thing might be …your news feed!

1. Your news feed isn’t just news

There is a bunch of information in your news feed that isn’t accurate.  It’s curated for you based on your click history right?  And it’s designed to get a rise out of you.  Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you already know this.  But do you know how much this non-news is adding to your body pain and inflammation?  There’s no real way to know precisely, but even if you scroll past and just shrug off or sneer at preposterous things in your feeds – they’re still affecting you and slowly piling on to that critical mass of biochemical triggers.

The fix: you have some control over how you respond internally and how you choose to contextualize the content you see.  That can be helpful but also exhausting.  You can also instead, consider taking a break from it just to see what that feels like.  Find out what it is that you gain from it and what life is like without it.

2. The “everyone else” factor

We are all seeing a lot about other people in our feeds whether that’s friends, family or strangers in the pop culture category.  It’s natural to subconsciously compare ourselves to others – that’s always going on in real life too. 

But with the volume of other-people-information (no matter how benign) coming at us digitally, we run the risk of riding the roller coaster of alternating schadenfreude (joy in others suffering) with fear of missing out. 

This creates an inherent discontent with the here and now.  Not being in the present can act as fuel for toxicity.

3. The urgency factor

There are a lot of needs and causes and things going wrong in the world that need fixing including you (according to many advertisers). 

I invite you to take a break for a day, a week or a month and just be curious about the experience.

That’s what I did and you can read more about my thoughts on it in one of my next posts.

All three of these influences that our news feeds can exert on us, can also impact our stress level and emotions.  Anything that impacts our emotions, world view and stress levels has the capacity to alter our biochemistry.  That’s the very biochemistry that can be the determining factor of what tips the scales in favor of pain.

You can read more about the biochemistry of pain right now in The Everyday Pain Guide Volume 1 Put Out the Fire. It’s available on Amazon and all major book outlets including Indiebound.org

Volume 2 Fix the Fire Damage is right around the corner. I’ll email you with pre-release deals and special offers. Just drop your contact info. below and you’ll be the first to know when the book drops!

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As originally published on medium.com/@yalingliou on February 18th, 2022