How your lower brain chatter affects your pain.
To understand pain, it is helpful to know how your mind works- you have a lower brain and a higher brain. Your lower brain's function is to keep you alive and safe from danger. To do this, it constantly scans the environment for potential threats. These threats may be real but sometimes they are not.
When we have experienced trauma- whether physical or emotional our lower brain can remain on hyper alert- to protect you form further danger.
It is as if your fight or flight response, gets stuck in the “on position”. And, unfortunately with chronic pain, the volume of this response is constantly on maximum.
Other problems are related to this “stuck” stress response too, such as ongoing muscle tension, fatigue, a racing heart. All of which are interpreted by the lower brain as further threats. This leads to a greater increase in your stress response. It is this reverberating loop which is going to contribute to your pain levels being driven higher.
The other things that lower brains like to do is worry and look for problems. This may show up as uncomfortable emotions such as fear and anxiety. And if there is nothing current to worry about it will find something whether it is in the past or in the future.
You might find your lower brain telling you: this pain is going to kill me; I have damaged my lower back again; I should ask my doctor to repeat my blood tests.
Your lower brain chatter can keep your mind occupied all day long telling you how bad things are. These types of thoughts can worsen your pain by increasing the stress response and may lead to depression if left unchecked.
Then you have your higher brain, that receives instructions from the lower brain. This part of your brain has to do with reasoning and intellect. It is the part of you that knows you should be going for a walk each day.
Unfortunately, when you wake up in the morning for your walk, your lower brain convinces you not to go by giving you a hundred reasons why it is a bad idea (lower brains don’t like change, they see them as a threat too).
This brings us to the question; how can we quieten this lower brain chatter? Firstly, you just need to start recognising which of your thoughts are part of this lower brain chatter and remember that your lower brain can be overly dramatic and ‘lie’ to you.
It can worry about things that are not actually important and not that scary. This is just your lower brain doing what lower brains do.
With practice, you can start to ignore the chatter. As a result, these thoughts start to lose their negative impact on your daily life. They no longer hold a threat.
This lowers the volume of your stress response, and you can get your sympathetic system unstuck. You stop the loop that was causing your thoughts and feelings to affect your pain!
By Dr Michelle Beukes-King
If you’re living with chronic pain and wanting practical tools to cope, connect, and rebuild your life, my online ACT for Chronic Pain group may be a good fit for you.
You’ll learn evidence-based skills in a supportive community — all from the comfort of home.
