Navigating Physical And Emotional Pain

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Today I want to talk about a difficult topic,

Pain.

As a clinical psychologist,

You may think I'm going to talk about just emotional pain,

But I also want to talk about physical pain because both of them are very challenging experiences that most of us will probably experience many times in our lives.

One of my dear relatives who I talk to every week is 82 years old and she's in a lot of physical pain.

Another friend of mine who I went to college with posts almost daily on social media how he's dealing or not dealing well with his wife who's dying from cancer and the emotional pain he's under.

I remember reading a story once about one of the queens of Europe who was under severe physical pain and she said she would give up all her kingdom to be pain free.

Here in the US where we're having a fentanyl severe crisis,

Fentanyl overdose killed over 70,

000 people last year and at its core,

Fentanyl is a painkiller and yet it's killing us.

So if you've ever been under severe emotional or physical pain,

My guess is you know exactly what I'm talking about and how devastating,

Overwhelming and crippling pain can be.

But this is the happiness podcast and I wanna give us hope.

I wanna give us tools so we don't have to suffer as much when we are going through a physical or emotional crisis of pain.

And I wanna do this by starting to talk about the difference between pain and suffering because they are different.

Pain is a physical sensation or emotional hurt versus suffering which is the story,

The resistance,

The amplification we add to the pain.

And then we have acute versus chronic pain where acute pain is like a warning signal,

There's something wrong,

Be careful,

Take care of this.

Where chronic pain has to do more with there's something overall wrong that is not functioning well and we need to fix it.

And then lastly,

There's the mind-body connection.

What I mean by that is stress,

Anxiety,

Depression can manifest physically and worsen the pain and vice versa.

When we have pain,

It can affect our stress,

Anxiety and depression.

They kinda go back and forth.

Our physical affects our emotional and our emotional can affect our physical.

So is there anything we can do about this pain that we're experiencing right now?

Are we just stuck with it?

Over the years,

I've done a lot of physical activities and I really enjoy them.

But the one that I would say physically impacted me the most in regards to generating pain in my body was backpacking in the mountains.

I don't know if you've ever done it before,

Even camping,

But carrying a 70 pound bag on your back and walking up to 20 miles a day can make the body really sore.

I remember coming back into the office after a backpacking trip and just the act of getting up out of my seat to say goodbye to my client at the end of the session could be so painful.

My clients that knew me pretty well could say,

Oh,

Did you go backpacking this weekend?

Because I would just be like an 89 year old man getting up out of that seat sometimes because there was so much aches and pain in my body.

But here's the difference.

Yes,

My body was in a lot of pain,

But it was in many ways wonderful.

You might be thinking,

Dr.

Puff,

You're crazy.

I hope not.

But I did really love the feeling of pushing my body,

Having the experience of being outdoors for a week or a weekend and enjoying all that came from that even though my body was in pain afterwards.

So let's think about professional athletes,

What they do with pain or discomfort is they see it as feedback.

They see it as part of their growth to improve their athletic performance and it's even a path towards achievement.

So instead of seeing the pain as something bad,

It's more of I embrace this.

I love pushing my body,

Keeping it healthy so that it will work for me in the future.

And yet someone else could be in the exact same amount of pain and have such a horrible story about that pain that they're hearing in their head.

The pain now,

Instead of just being pain,

Is suffering because the story they're creating about the pain.

And in many ways,

It's the same thing with emotional pain.

When we go through a crisis,

We're going to feel emotional pain.

I've shared this story many times on this podcast that when my Labrador Retriever named Einstein died after being with me for 15 years and coming to work with me,

So he was with me almost all the time,

When he was dying and I held him and I could tell he was no more,

I cried harder than I ever had cried in my life.

But it wasn't a bad cry,

It was a cry of I'll miss you,

I love you.

I knew it was his time and I needed to grieve and I did.

And then instead of creating a story of this is so unfair,

Why did this happen to me?

I celebrated him and the life we had together.

With both physical and emotional pain,

The difficulty with it is it doesn't seem fair at times.

It isn't things that we're doing that cause us to feel physical pain sometimes.

Sometimes it's just bad.

And then sometimes the emotional things that happen to us are just so unfair.

When or if our child is dying or is suffering,

It's so hard on us.

The pain of that loss can be quite overwhelming,

But what makes it so much worse is the suffering that we bring to that pain,

Whether physical or emotional.

We live in a world that has painful things happen in it.

Many times it happens to other people.

Sometimes it happens to us.

We're sitting at a red light,

Completely stopped,

And the person behind us wasn't paying attention and slams into us.

And now we're in the hospital,

We're in excruciating pain,

And it just doesn't seem fair.

Or when someone that we deeply love gets diagnosed with terminal cancer,

And they're young,

And they're vibrant,

And they have so much before them,

But that's coming to an end.

It seems so unfair.

But if we've lived long enough,

We know these events do happen.

And sometimes they happen to other people,

But sometimes they happen to us.

And whether it's physical pain or emotional pain,

Denying that sensation,

That grief,

That experience does nothing.

It only hurts us.

But when we acknowledge it and say,

Yes,

I am experiencing pain right now,

And then go towards what can I do to make it better?

That's the path we take to live a good life,

With the greatest opportunity to both survive the pain and thrive through the pain.

But what we tend to do,

Which catches us,

Which causes us to suffer so much more in many ways unnecessarily,

Is that we begin to create stories in our head.

Like,

This isn't fair.

Why is this happening to me?

Do I deserve this?

Or this is never gonna end.

I'm gonna have to live with this for the rest of my life.

My life is over.

What we hear in our head matters.

It shapes how we experience the pain,

And whether we turn it into something that we can thrive through,

Survive,

And live well,

Even if it's still there.

Or if we suffer far more than we need to.

I'm not saying we can't spend five,

10 minutes saying,

This is so unfair,

I hate this.

Sometimes it's good to give a little bit of that out,

Just get it out of our system.

But what we mostly spend our energy on is,

Okay,

This is what I have.

How can I make this better?

Or if I can't necessarily make it better,

How can I distract from it?

When it comes to physical pain,

Think about how athletes do interpret the pain very differently than other people that are in pain.

They see it as a consequence of part of the choices they made,

And they actually see it as an opportunity to improve themselves overall.

Now,

When we're in physical pain,

It's not easy to say,

Okay,

I see the benefits of this pain,

Dr.

Buff.

We may not.

But what energy,

What thoughts we give towards it truly impacts the way we experience that pain.

I remember once when I had torn my hamstring,

That I was at a play with my family.

And if I sat too long,

It became tight and it really hurt.

So what I would do during the play is get up,

Go towards the back of the performance and stretch it.

And then I'd come back and sit down again.

And then when it hurt again,

I got up,

Went to the back of the performance,

Stretch it and came sat down again.

You may say,

Well,

Dr.

Puff,

You chose to do something that caused you to get that injury.

Actually,

I got that injury literally by walking across the street and it just snapped.

And it took about six months for it to heal completely where it didn't hurt anymore.

But during that six months,

When it was hurting,

I would try to do things that could alleviate the pain a bit.

And there were many things I could do.

I'm a big fan of yoga.

And when it comes to physical pain,

Yoga is really good,

At least for my body,

To help alleviate pain.

And it's the same thing with emotional pain.

We are going to go through difficult times.

The key of it is,

Is to have an attitude of,

How can I make this better?

Not why is this happening to me?

This is so unfair.

Or thinking it's gonna be there forever.

No,

Every day,

Every hour,

We proactively do things to make it better.

And our mindset greatly impacts whether we are going to get better and find things to improve our lives,

Or whether we're gonna stay stuck for the rest of our lives.

I remember how a fellow psychologist of mine told me the story,

How he had severely injured his back and he was in a lot of pain.

And because he hated the pain,

He tried very hard not to move at all.

But what he found was,

He was getting depressed,

He was getting anxious,

And he was in pain.

So then he realized that,

If I push my body a little bit,

I know the difference between pain and this is going to injure me worse.

And he just did things that pushed it,

But not to the point where it caused him further injury.

And he found was,

After a few weeks,

His back pain was so much better.

It's the same way emotionally.

We all know people,

Perhaps we're depressed right now.

And what do they do?

They stay home,

They do nothing.

And they just stay stuck in the depression.

And yet if they get out,

Go in nature,

Go for a walk,

Do things that proactively change it,

Hang out with friends,

They do feel better.

But being stuck in the quagmire of the depression keeps them in that depression.

What I'm suggesting is that we create a mindset of taking one day at a time and saying,

What can I do today,

What can I do right now that can alleviate this painful experience,

Whether emotional or physical,

That I'm going through?

And not only alleviate it,

But make it better,

Improve it,

So that it becomes less and less with time.

I think one of the most wonderful things that the medical community provides when we're in pain is physical therapy.

Physical therapy hurts if you've ever done it,

But it also gets us better and gets the pain set more at bay because we're doing things to proactively improve it.

Similarly,

When we're in emotional pain,

Psychotherapy teaches us tools,

Like on this podcast,

On how to make our lives better so that we don't suffer.

Yes,

The emotional pain is there,

But we can do many things to alleviate that suffering and make it better.

So if right now you are in some sort of emotional or physical pain,

Pay very close attention to the stories that are going on in your head and replace them with,

If they end up being negative,

With things like,

What can I do right now to make this better?

I don't know what tomorrow will bring,

But today there are things I can do to make my life a little bit better,

And I'm gonna keep doing them each and every day.

And the most important one I'm gonna watch is not creating stories about this going on forever and ever and that my life is over.

It's never over.

There's always something we can do to make our lives better,

No matter what.

And even if right now there's nothing you can do to change the pain you're going through,

What you can do is focus on something beautiful in your life and give your attention to that.

There's just always something beautiful that life gives us.

When we focus on the beauty in life,

The pain lessens,

And sometimes the pain goes completely away.

Please don't give up.

Keep moving forward.

Keep working on improving yourself.

Keep fighting the pain so that you'll know that each day you're gonna do well and make your life a most beautiful,

Wonderful experience,

No matter what.

Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.

Until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Thank you.