When's the last time you felt really great?
If you've ever dealt with kidney stones, you know how awful they can be. I have (six times in total), and each time, I am reminded of what real pain is.
I couldn't take time off to treat it, so I pretty much worked through them. I even took a trip up to New York last week to appear on the Martha channel on Sirius radio, and I am reasonably certain that no one there knew just how much pain I was in.
Whenever I have experiences like this, I think about my patients who deal with pain every day, and how difficult and exhausting their lives can be.
Latch onto the Good, not the Bad
I often think back to something my wife said to me the first time she saw me cope with an episode of stones. She said, 'There are times in your life you will feel pain, and most of the other times when you don't. Try to latch onto the times you are feeling good."
This was insightful advice. Whenever we are in pain the tendency is to focus on the pain, and how bad we are feeling right now. The fact is, it is much more useful to latch onto the times you feel good. When in your day do you feel good? When was the last time you felt great?
Focusing on the pain can keep you trapped in the mindset of feeling bad. Thinking about the times in your life when you felt good, or when you might be feeling better, is a powerful tool for relieving and ultimately recovering from pain.
As you deal with pain, take time in your day to reflect upon the times when you feel good. Visualize yourself feeling great, and look forward to that time when you will feel better than you do now. It may be hard when in the throes of serious discomfort, but with concentration and focus, these periods of meditation will ultimately help you to feel less pain in the now, and recover faster.
Andrew Kirschner, D.O., is a board-certified physician with a private practice in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and a consultancy in Miami, Florida. He specializes in treating individuals and couples with musculoskeletal and back pain. To learn more about his practice, please visit BackTogether.org.
From: Lise | 10/29/10 at 5:23 pm
Andrew love this post. Gr8 advice & as someone who also knows what kidney stones is like it's all the more potent as until you've gone thru that sort of pain you will never know what take you out of your body pain is like! ;^)
From: Remembering when you felt great: the power of latching. « BackWords | 11/1/10 at 1:08 pm
[...] in my most recent post on Martha Stewart’s Whole Living Daily blog, I posted on the power of latching, that is focusing your mind on the parts of your life going [...]