Understanding How Your Body Feels Pain and the Many Ways to Manage It
We’re going to talk about how pain works in the brain. You may already be familiar with a lot of this material from life experiences, but we hope to shed light on these concepts by incorporating specifics about cancer pain.
When people think about their pain, they can often point to an event or something that caused it. For example: a tumor, an injury, or complications of surgery or another cancer treatment. But many other things can affect a person’s experience of pain, including stress, sleep, emotions, and medications. For this reason, it is often helpful to find several different tools to help relieve pain and lessen its impact on your life.
One goal of My Pain Pal is to help you identify some of the things that may make your pain worse, and help you find tools to address those things and better manage your pain.
Your Brain, Nerves, and Pain
To understand pain, first we need to understand a little bit about nerves and the brain.
Nerves - the "Electrical Wires"
Nerves are like little electrical wires that travel throughout your body – connecting everything to your brain. Messages travel along nerves and tell your brain what you feel, hear, taste, smell and see. Specific types of nerves detect and send messages about specific feelings such as heat, cold, light touch, vibration, pain, and more.
Brain - the "Command Center"
Your nerves send messages to your brain, which is like a “command center” that makes sense of everything and decides how you will respond.
You have different areas of your brain for touch, movement, smells, sight, memories, emotions, urges, and decision-making. These different areas are connected to each other through their own “electrical wires” that send messages back and forth. This process helps your brain turn signals from your nerves into messages that you can feel and understand.
You may be wondering, “where is the area for pain?” Good question. It turns out, there is no specific area in the brain for pain. Instead, different areas of your brain work together to help you understand the pain you feel.
How your brain and nerves work together to feel pain
Pain happens when nerves are triggered. Let’s say you bump your elbow. The signal travels from your elbow, through your nerves to your brain, and then you feel pain. A similar thing can happen when you have a tumor.
Signals about pain travel to both the physical and the emotional parts of your brain. That’s why being in pain not only hurts physically, but also emotionally.
What else impacts pain?
You’ve probably noticed in your life that many things impact your pain. Pain can make emotions like worry, anxiety, anger, and sadness much worse. It also works the other way around – negative emotions often make your pain feel worse.
Other areas of your brain (for example, memory and sleep areas) are also connected to the emotional and physical areas of your brain. Overtime, messages from these brain areas crisscross and get tangled up. This means that you cannot separate the emotion part of pain from the physical, and it is really important to treat both.
Beyond emotion, many other things can impact your experience of pain. This includes stress, constipation, the weather, sleep, and relationships. Again, this is because so much of what happens in your brain spills over into other brain areas, including pain areas.
A common example of this is when you have a bad night sleep, you may find that your pain is much worse the next day. Or – if you find yourself worried about a bill that is due, or conflict with someone you love, you may also notice your pain flaring up.
On the other hand, many people notice that when they are happy or doing something they enjoy (like watching a movie, or talking to a good friend), their pain might feel better.
Think back over the last week, and try to think of 2 things that made your pain feel better, and 2 things that made it feel worse. The picture below may help.
Cancer
Emotions
Physical activity
Music
Diet
Prayer
Stress
Constipation
Pain
Medicines
Weather
Sleep
Other diseases
Genetics
"Chemo Brain"
Cancer treatment
Distraction
Relationships
How does your brain decide?
To make sense of all the different messages your brain receives from your nerves, your brain uses your experiences and memories to decide what that feeling is.
Let’s review an example most of us can relate to. Think of the many feelings you might have in your belly in just few days’ time.
The label your brain chooses depends on what is going on in the moment, and based upon what you know from past experiences. For example, if you just ate a huge lunch, your brain will likely label the feeling as “I’m full.”
Your brain makes a lot of these decisions automatically, without you realizing it. The same thing happens with your pain. Your brain uses labels and short cuts to understand the messages in your nerves and decide how you’re feeling.
For example, if you know that you have a tumor in your hip and you feel something in your hip, your brain may connect that physical feeling to lots of really common worrying thoughts like “my cancer might be growing,” or “what if this gets worse?” or “what if I injure myself when I’m walking?” These types of thoughts and emotions can make the pain feel intense, which can make worrying thoughts and emotions get worse. It can be a vicious cycle, huh?
How does this help manage pain?
You may not be able to change the underlying cause of your pain, and you may not be able to control all of the factors that impact it.
What you CAN do, is be aware of your pain, what makes it worse or better, and take steps to change some of the things in your control. Pain medications are a big part of this. And the good news is that there are a lot of other strategies to try that can help.
Pay attention to your thoughts, your emotions, your activities, and your pain, and start to notice any connections between them. Over time you may find that certain things tend to make your pain better or worse. You may find that some of these things you can change, and those changes can make a big difference for your life.
Along the way, this app will ask questions to help get the process going. Talk to your care team, and your loved ones about what you notice and make sure to ask for help when you need it.
In summary:
Your nerves send signals from your body to your brain
Your brain then decides how you’re feeling based on sensations and other brain processes like emotions and memories
Many other aspects of your life impact your pain, including emotions, stress, sleep, and relationships
So, where do I start?
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Start by writing down 2 things that make your pain feel better, and 2 things that make your pain feel worse.
Over the next month, continue to complete the daily surveys which will track how your emotions, mood, and sleep are interacting with your pain.
Continue to pay attention to things that make your pain better and worse.
In the moment, when you notice pain, take a step back and take note of what thoughts are going through your head.
Use this app to learn different activities and tools to manage your pain.
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