How To Reduce Chronic Inflammation To Decrease Pain

When you hear the term inflammation, we often think of something that is very wrong in our body. However, inflammation is necessary to cause healing especially right after an injury. Many medical professionals nowadays try to use various strategies to encourage the inflammation process to run its natural course. 

Short term inflammation isn’t a bad thing, however, chronic inflammation creates a problem. Long-term inflammation has been linked to to a number of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune issues, digestive problems, neurodegenerative diseases (like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s), and pain!

While there are plenty of people on social media will to tell you to do “JUST THIS!” To help chronic inflammation, there is no one thing that you should be doing. On the other hand, you don’t have to feel defeated by the other people online that tell you that your whole life has to become centered around trying to manage chronic inflammation, there is a place in the middle that is very reasonable. 

You don’t have to do most of these things to greatly improve inflammation and overall well-being

Working on issues like chronic inflammation are key in reducing a lot of joint, musculoskeletal, and even nerve pain. Just like training though, we want to see what is the BIGGEST things we can do that will have the greatest impact not just on one thing, but many aspects of inflammation. 

People might think we would start at places like sleep and nutrition. Those are both VERY important in the process of helping chronic inflammation, but we have to take a bit of a step back. Now, what I am about to suggest is probably going to get some serious roll of the eyes, but let me pose the problem actually first with starting with sleep and nutrition. 

Both sleep and good nutrition are behaviors and it is the behaviors behind these actions that are most challenging to most people. Most at this point in our world know good sleep, eating quality foods are great ways to build better health, yet, we often struggle to do both (we can throw exercise in here as well). So, just telling people they need to sleep or eat better isn’t that helpful and neither is making people feel like they have to do a million things to do both! 

There is actually A LOT of research that shows feeling stressed significantly impairs decision-making abilities, leading to reliance on habits, biased judgments, and difficulty assessing risks and benefits, ultimately resulting in poor choices. That is why even though we KNOW certain things are good for us, when we are in a heightened state we tend to default to things that feel good just in the moment even at the expense of better actions. 

Decision-making stress and satisfaction : a cognitive-affective model

For example, that may be staying up watching tv instead of trying to go to bed, it could be going for the ice cream because you are really upset. When people are simply stuck reacting to things in their lives, they often don’t make the best decisions even though they may know it isn’t good for them (this is also the reason for many developing addictions). 

That is why the first step I do suggest is teaching some simple strategies of mindfulness. Wait?! I want you to meditate? Not necessarily, we can use meditation as a tool to help build mindfulness, but we don’t actually have to meditate to increase mindfulness. 

Research has shown that mindfulness practices can enhance decision-making by promoting present moment awareness, reducing emotional reactivity, and fostering more rational and thoughtful choices. Mindfulness is used in many chronic health conditions (including pain) because it helps develop better relationships with people’s health, it can reduce their stress, lowers inflammation, and helps start to create the foundation to building better habits from sleep, nutrition, and even exercise. 

How do you start? I like to start with the following…

We can start with very simple movements that help us become aware of our body and breath this can have very profound effects as you can see.

-Can you become aware of what you are feeling in the moment? Are you angry, sad, frustrated, worried, what emotions can you identify?

-Can you start to identify any stories that you notice you are telling yourself? Maybe it is something as simple as, “I’ll never be able to go to sleep and I am going to be SO tired at work tomorrow and feel like crap!” These stories may feel VERY true at the moment, but they are only stories and may not reflect what actually ends up happening to us. Telling them though starts to program our brains to actually carry out these stories though, the good news, we can work with different stories. 

-Now that you notice some of the emotions and stories, can you feel areas of your body that might feel like they are responding to them? Is your neck getting tight? Does your stomach feel upset? Is your heart racing? Do you feel yourself getting really hot? Can you notice any sensations of your body without identifying them as good or bad, just can you be aware of them? 

-If you can find somewhere in your body that you identify some sensations, can you become curious about them? What does THAT mean? If you feel like your neck is getting tight, what other sensations are there? Can you look at the sensations like you would watch animals at the zoo and being curious about what they are doing and how they are behaving?Can you be curious like the first time you are trying a new food? The texture, the flavors you notice and so forth? Is the tightness feel like it is pulling? Is it just tightness or is there a throbbing, burning, etc.?

Getting people to be more mindful of their movement, going slow and learning to soften the body along with breath can be a great entry point for many.  You can check more about our upcoming Chronic Pain Masterclass or Myofascial Integrated Movement Programs HERE

Now you may think noticing these things are bad, but they are exactly what we need to help improve our situation. The key is to identify these sensations as good or bad right now, just notice them. I know that sounds hard and not normal, but it is a big part of the process. Don’t label them, just notice them. Instead of saying, I feel burning, try, “I notice there is a sensation of burning”. This may sound like semantics but research shows such strategies are highly effective! 

-The next part is where we start more work, now we start to bring in some breathing. We use breath as a point of focus and we start just focusing on the sensations of breath. Not worrying if we are doing it correctly or not, not trying to get rid of the sensations or emotions we are experiencing. You can focus on where you feel the breath, what does the breath feel like, is your stomach or chest moving, does it feel full or short, do you feel it just in the front of your body or the back and sides too? 

If feeling the breath in your body is too difficult or uncomfortable, you can focus on the breath by the nose. Breath in through the nose and can you feel cool air as you breath in and when you breath out through your nose can you feel warm air. All you are doing is noticing, not trying to regulate your breath. 

Once you practice this for 2-5 minutes, then we can start to focus on the sensations of the body. As you continue to breath, can you notice the sensations and just be with them. Meaning, you don’t start telling yourself a story, you don’t start getting concerned with them, you don’t try to make them go away, you simply continue to breathe, noticing the sensations, and telling yourself these are just sensations and you are in a safe place. 

You can start to see if you can “soften” the area that you feel sensations. For example, if your neck is all tight, can you allow your shoulders to drop? Can you soften your chest? I find soften works better than relax because when people are in a heightened state and trying to relax can make them more frustrated. If the sensations are getting to be too much to deal with and causing more distress, simply come back to the breath. What we are slowly doing is teaching the brain that what we are experiencing is not a threat and we don’t have to be in this state that is causing a lot of the chronic inflammation. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that using methods as I have described get rid of all experiences of bad feelings or stop bad things from happening to us. Rather, they are designed to help us have healthier responses to them and to be accept the challenges that life will inevitably throw at us in ways that keep us in a better place. 

These strategies are essential for what we are going to continue to share about not just exercise, but overall well-being. This is the part of our Myofascial Integrated Movement program that tends to get overlooked, but is what makes it so powerful WITH the movements. 

We are going to continue to break down these strategies and practicing them in short, but frequent bouts can be really helpful. Not to mention they can be done anywhere at anytime. 

Find out MUCH more as our Chronic Pain Masterclass is NOW open! Right now you can save on a special discount with code “pain” HERE