Bodily pain has always been an issue for me - hypermobile bodies are all too easy to hurt. Soreness and stiffness are pretty much constant for me, but at the moment it's tending to be at a level I can cope with.
Usually I rely on willpower and discipline for managing pain when there's enough of it to be intrusive. I can push through a lot, and I can tune out a lot. However, those are finite resources and when I've been tired, stressed or worse still burned out, I've not been able to deal with pain by force of will.
At that point it comes down to how much emotional resilience I have. If I'm in a decent place emotionally I can tough things out, although if I'm in pain for long enough, that will wipe me out emotionally.
If I'm wiped out emotionally as well, the combination of being in pain and having no resources I can use will tend to push me into panic and distress. Perhaps not unreasonably. At this point I'm trying to come up with strategies for handling that better - there's not much I can do in that kind of situation, but there may well be things that can be done to help me.
Stress is a major underpinner in all of this. If I'm stressed I'm more likely to tense up and this increases my pain levels. Stress makes it harder to concentrate and robs me of mental capacity for coping. It also significantly undermines me emotionally. I can take modest amounts of stress, I think I'm about average on that score. However, I've had to deal with some extremely stressful things along the way, and it takes a toll. My most recent episode with unmanageable pain was clearly stress triggered, and getting one in a context where my general stress levels were much lower has really made the process obvious.
It's an alarming thing getting to a point of no longer being able to function. Like most people who live with pain, I can stay functional in face of pain far more readily than people who aren't used to it. The kinds of things I've been through mean I'm fairly tough mentally and can endure a lot. I'm coming to the conclusion that I might feel more emotion than is typical, and that the degree to which I get upset about things has everything to do with the degree to which I care about things. That's not something I have any interest in changing.
It is however interesting to ask questions about what would make me better resourced. Less stress is right at the top of the list. Less stress makes everything more feasible. Being able to rest and sleep radically improves my mental functioning and emotional resilience. I think rather than trying to firefight this, the key is almost certainly to look at how relaxed and how well resourced I am the rest of the time. Trying to deal with this level of malfunction when I'm in the middle of it is nigh on impossible. Having a life where this sort of thing just doesn't happen would be far more effective.
Rather than pushing to my limits all of the time I'm going to look more at building inner resources and resilience. I'd be much harder to break if I wasn't spending most of my time a hair's breadth from breaking point, and that now seems like a realistic goal. I'm in a position where I can genuinely choose to change this, and that's an exciting prospect and an enormous privilege.
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