Chronic pain is something that affects many people’s lives. It can be difficult to live with but there are things you can do to make it easier and things you can avoid to make sure you keep your chronic pain handled. In fact, Healthy Heroics‘ take on chronic pain will leave you bootstrapped for seizing whatever opportunity you have to battle it and come up as a better person once all is said and done.
What to Do When You Live When Chronic Pain
The first thing to know about living in chronic pain is that there are some things you can do to make things more bearable. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at seven of the things you should do to help manage your chronic pain.
1. Work with Your Doctor
If you are suffering from chronic pain, you should speak to your doctor. This can be intimidating to some because they fear their doctor not believing them about how much pain they are in. If you explain things to your doctor clearly and they won’t help, you might want to consider talking to a new doctor to get a second opinion.
There are a couple rules to keep in mind when you are explaining your pain to your doctor. First and foremost, you should never embellish or exaggerate your pain and you should never understate your pain. It is absolutely crucial that you and your doctor are on the same page to come up with a treatment plan.
When you are describing your pain, you should use simple adjectives to create a clear picture. For instance, is the pain a dull ache or a sharp, stabbing pain? You also shouldn’t come to your own conclusions about your chronic pain. While you should explain your pain in full with your doctor and discuss your medical history, you shouldn’t necessarily come in with a diagnosis in your head if you haven’t been given one. You aren’t trained in this area of expertise but your doctor is.
Finally, it is important that you don’t recommend treatment plans from your doctor. Once again, you aren’t trained in how to pinpoint the cause and treatment of your pain. This is particularly true for medications – never ask your doctor for a specific medication. This will oftentimes make them suspicious of your motives for the appointment.
Once you find a good doctor, though, they can help you to nail down a treatment plan. This might include medications or other techniques to handle your pain. The first plan might not be perfect but a doctor who is good at their job and genuinely caring about your well-being will work with you to find a solution that makes your life easier. It might take time but the effort will be well worth it once your pain is more manageable.
2. Look Into Supplements and Natural Alternatives
While they most often are not the full answer to your chronic pain, there are supplements and natural alternatives to your chronic pain. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t start anything without consulting your doctor and knowing exactly what you are taking. If you aren’t sure where to start when learning about these supplements, you can look at Healthy Heroics’ take and other website’s recommendations on the matter.
3. Try to Reduce Stress
Stress is unavoidable in everyday life. There is always something out of our control whether it is the weight of our responsibilities or arguments in our personal lives, it seems like there’s something on every corner that is ready to give us a headache. The unfortunate truth is that for many people, stress can trigger chronic pain.
While you can’t eliminate stress from your life entirely, you can take steps to reduce and manage stress. Particularly, you should try to reduce the physical responses to stress such as tightened muscles which is usually what triggers your pain. Meditation and yoga are both common choices for handling stress and relaxing the body.
4. Look for Support
When you are dealing with chronic pain, there are plenty of people around you that don’t understand exactly what you are going through and even some who don’t fully believe you. If these are all the people surrounding you, it can be easy to feel like you are alone. That no one else understands the pain you continue to go through.
This, however, isn’t the case at all. There are plenty of other people who also suffer from chronic pain and know your plight. As such, it is a wise idea for anyone who suffers from chronic pain to find others so that they can support each other. This can be in the form of a support group or just finding a friend in which you can lean on one another – the idea is to find what’s best for you.
5. Stay Close to Family and Friends.
As we noted before, it can be frustrating to constantly surrounded by people who don’t understand what is going on. An important distinction to make, though, is that not everyone who doesn’t suffer from chronic pain doesn’t believe you or isn’t there for you. Odds are, a good number of your family and friends want to help you even if they aren’t sure exactly how.
It’s important that you don’t cut these people out of your life. The worst thing you can do when you are going through anything – including chronic pain – is to not isolate yourself. This will only make things harder to deal with. Instead, don’t be afraid to lean on the support that your family and friends are offering you.
6. Make Your Home Friendly to You
You can’t control every environment you enter throughout the day. There is one environment that you can control entirely, though. Your home can be made any way that you want it and it is meant to be a haven. With that in mind, you should make your home is a place that works with your chronic pain, not against it.
If you use something often, keep it well within reach where you don’t have to stretch or strain to get what you need. You can take this step and any other in your home so that even on your bad days you aren’t struggling more than you need to.
7. Do Your Research
Finally, the best thing you can do when you are living with chronic pain is to be informed. This starts by asking your doctor questions. They are your most reliable source of information. From there, they can recommend you to additional sources of information so you can learn as much reliable information as possible to help you along the way.
What Shouldn’t You Do?
The one thing you shouldn’t do when you are living with chronic pain is to give up hope. You will, of course, have days that are harder than others. When these days happen, though, you need to hold out hope for the better days to come. What you definitely shouldn’t do is stop living your life to the fullest. Don’t sacrifice your life to chronic pain – you should manage your chronic pain but don’t let it define you.
You should take the steps above to make living with chronic pain more bearable. Make sure you don’t push your support system away and stay on your treatment track and don’t give up.
About the Author
Samantha Rosario is a writer in Content Blossom, www.contentblossom.com, a mother and resident of the greatest city in the world, NYC. When not working at a Manhattan publishing house, she’s spending time with her family or putting pen to paper for her own personal pursuits.
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