Reversing Learned Helplessness

Your beliefs can modulate your chronic pain, according scientific research

Reversing Learned Helplessness

If you spend the next five minutes with me, you will be forced to change your
attitude toward chronic pain. The latest scientific research is conclusive; your
expectations drive or inhibit pain. It is your beliefs that make the difference.

Get this: the mere fact of thinking about your pain is a command to your brain
to increase it. If you have strategies (no matter how crazy) and believe in their
efficacy, you can learn to modulate your chronic pain perception.

Japan

Anesthesiologists in Japan readily admit that injections of the intravenous
anesthetic, Propofol produce a high level of pain to patients.

The author of the study, Tomoko Higashi, M.D. published 10.16.07 discovered
asking the patient to count aloud prior and during the injection, reduced
the pain significantly. Of the patients requested to count during the injection,
none complained of pain, while just one recalled having pain at the site of the
Propofol injection.

Dr. Higashi, an instructor at Yokohama City University, says, We want to
contribute to understanding the mechanisms of pain cognition and relief.

The Causative Factor

The activity of counting is a function of your left hemisphere, specifically the language center of the brain. Positive feelings and thoughts emanate from your
left brain.

The brain's reptilian complex (Sympathetic Nervous System and Brainstem) controls automatic functions (instincts), while the Limbic system, particularly your amygdala, operate your emotions and feelings.

Both are located on your right hemisphere. Negative feelings and thoughts (mental imagery) are a product of your right brain. When you count aloud (or silently) you
shift from anxieties and fears of pain, to your left brain language area for cognition.

More

If your child lies on the ground hysterical with fear about his/her bloody knee,
he/she is accessing mental imagery from the amygdala (right brain).
What kind of mental movies? She images a painful death through bleeding.

All your reasonable, logical explanations that the suffering is just a minor scratch
and the bleeding will stop with a bandaid, are a waste of breath. Your child feels the
burning pain and sees the blood and when her eyes are closed, she imagines the injury covers her entire body.

Do This

Start singing the B-I-N-G-O song then stop and whisper in her ear, if you sing
BINGO with me, the pain will disappear and the bleeding cease and desist.

The magic is in switching her brain dominance from the right hemisphere and
its negative mental movies, to her left hemispheric language center.

You don't know the words? Google the BINGO song. It is simple and requires
the substitution of a clap for each missing letter. It works physiologically. It
takes up to 90 seconds to make the mental switch and never fails.

Pain Cognition and Hope

What you believe about your pain ? the meaning you ascribe to it ? increases
or decrease the amount you experience. You choice directly influences your level of
hope, and your potential recovery. The enemy is hopelessness and helplessness.

It is your expectation Simon, that dials up the level of pain.

Choices

a) This pain is a challenge and I will fully recover.

b) I hate this pain and may not accomplish my goals.

c) I am scared to death my time is up.

If you see chronic pain as a challenge, you enlist your endorphins to relieve
your burden. You have hope and statistically will almost double the standard
recovery rates.

Positive beliefs and hope overcome and lower your depression score compared to those who view pain as the enemy or a punishment. We are talking about life and
death because of your attitude and mood.

Consider This

There are two approaches to pain. One is perception of the feelings and drawing
your own conclusions about its scope. The other is active modulation (regulate)
how you experience the sensations.

Pain is not a fact like a broken bone or bleeding knee; it is a (sensory) perception
like hunger, thirst or the need to relieve your bladder. You have often delayed
these perceptions, right?

Location of Pain Circuits

Pain involves up to 10 separate areas of your brain; the leading one is the ACC,
the anterior cingulate cortex. They transmit information back and forth from
the amydala, insula, brainstem, and basal ganglia. Your Central Nervous System
and Sympathetic Nervous Systems get into the act too.

Placebo And Nocebo

Your brain can shut down the pain or augment (increase) it, based on your
belief, expectation and feelings you have been given pain relief. A physician
can inject you with a saline solution (water) and your beliefs will cause your
body to respond as if you received a miracle cure.

If your doctor informs you he has found a tumor, your body will react as if
it is a fact when there is none. It is mind over matter, and if you have no
mind, nothings matters, right? But we do have a mind and our beliefs
create our reaction and behaviors.

It is the Mu Opioid Receptors that cause the placebo reactions; your body reacts
to beliefs as if you received morphine. Fake opioids cause the brain to release
real ones. Belief becomes reality; your mind unites with your body.

Google: Oxford University study by Dr. Irene Tracy and New York Times
article 5.14.06 by Melanie Thernstrom

Endwords

There are coping strategies to modulate chronic pain. Some folks are better at it
than others because they believe. It pains me to say that seemingly insane acts
of belief (handling snakes, talking in tongues) can reduce or eliminate chronic
pain. If you have hope, you cope. Contrarians, beware of the power of disbelief.

We also suggest you improve your cognition by reading-and-remembering three (3)
books, articles and reports in the time others can hardly finish one. Ask us how
to 3x your learning speed and 2x your long-term memory.

See ya,
copyright 2007
H. Bernard Wechsler
[e-mail] www.speedlearning.org

H. Bernard Wechsler, legal background, author of Speed Reading for Professionals,
published by Barron's, business partner of Evelyn Wood, creator of Speed
Reading, graduating 2 million including the White House staff of four U.S.
Presidents. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.
Director of Education of SpeedLearning Institute, www.speedlearning.org