Is it all too much? Are you in constant pain? Has your threshold been reached?
This is why just picking up a toy of you child or dog can lead to severe back pain.
This is a simplified explanation how pain is created, how your nervous system works, and what you can do about it.
How Pain and Stress Accumulate in Your Life
Imagine you are carrying a bucket around ALL THE TIME. 🪣
This bucket has only a certain capacity until it reaches its threshold and overflows.
Everything of your previous experiences of threats come into this bucket and fills it up = INPUTS. Your history matters. It all adds up, so the water in the bucket rises more and more.
Imagine you roll over in bed, your spouse might give you a uncertain look, next thing you know, you see hundreds of emails in your inbox, there must be a problem at work. You head down to the car, realize you forgot your car keys, turn around in a hurry, grab the keys, get back into the car, and drive to the office, facing heavy traffic and so on…
By 8:00 am you are already starting to fill up your bucket.
But it’s not only your relationship problems, work problems & time management problems. Many other things going into the bucket and live there rent-free when unresolved & untreated.
Examples of Threats Filling Your Bucket
Let’s look areas that can have a high impact on your overall threat level:
- Vision: Spending 8 hrs in front of a screen, loss of good eye movement, poor binocular vision = adding threat
- Exercise: Beneficial, but you constantly overdoing it = adding threat
- Sleep: Feeling tired in the morning or waking up frequently = adding threat
- Balance: Having a mild vestibular problem = adding threat
These are more examples that cause the water in the bucket rise:
- Poor sleep
- Old injuries
- Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
- Stress
- Over-exercising
- Unhealthy movement patterns
- Relationship issues
- Accidents
- Suppressed emotions
- Negative beliefs
- Inefficient breathing patterns
- Financial worries
- Balance issues
- Poor nutrition
- Unresolved conflicts
- Negative mindset
All unresolved old threats from the list above live there rent-free.
When you wake up in the morning you might just have a small certain amount left before your bucket overflows and your brain creates a protective output = PAIN.
If your bucket overflows a certain threshold your brain gives you a negative output, unwanted symptoms, survival outputs.
Strategies to Empty Your Threat Bucket
You need to clean up your bucket in order to perform in the long run. No one can do this for you; you need to do the work yourself.
Sometimes you are standing in your own way. You are not stuck. There a million things you can change to unstuck yourself.
I am here to tell you everything matters and there is hope in so many different ways to get rid of your pain, your constant high stress level & your anxiety.
You might be overwhelmed and think: ‘That’s too many things to consider.’ But when you look at it from a different angle, you’ll see that there are so many ways to change your unwanted symptoms, which should give you a lot of hope and a new perspective.
Understanding Recurrent Pain and Its Causes
The brain will usually defaults to the pain you are already familiar with instead of creating a new one. That’s why your same back pain keeps coming and going, chronic headache persist, lumbago returns again and again…
Pain is not the only tool the brain uses as output, to make you change, stop & rethink, but it is the most frequent one.
It can also lead, in the long term, to anxiety and depression.
The brain works with the highest efficiency. Creating a new pain costs too much energy/calories, so it sticks to the old one, where the pathway is already created.
Taking Action: Steps Toward a Balanced Life
Lowering overall threat is the first step to a stress-free and high-performing life.
Just think about areas where you can tweak your daily routine a bit to lower the overall water level in your bucket. For example:
- Create a good sleep hygiene
- Add gentle movement daily
- Practice stress management exercises
- Avoid looking at your emails first thing in the morning
- Add morning walks to your routine
- Take regular breaks during the day
- Eat healthy foods
- Incorporate a Breathing Practice
- Stay Hydrated
- …
Let me know what you are doing right now to reduce your threat level.
After lowering your overall threat level you can work on creating an environment that allows you to build up a resilient & high-performing YOU.
If you want help with this. Feel free to drop me a message with any questions you have. I am always here to help you. ➡️ office@michiprimusyoga.com