Once you have tweaked your back a few times, you stand a good chance of dragging yourself down into a pain cycle. Here are the 5 things people who suffer from pain do.

THEY STOP PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

If you become sedentary it will start a cascade of bad stuff: your sleep will suffer, you’ll weaken your muscles meaning you’ll slide towards a boring disabled lifestyle, with a loss of control over your daily life. The more you sit and do nothing, the more you focus on your pain. The worse it becomes

THEY FALL INTO THE OVER ACTIVITY TRAP

taking advantage of any easing of pain to work yourself to exhaustion, or into pain. This means you need to collapse until you recover. When you have recovered a bit, you slog through loads of work until you are exhausted or in pain. This leads to worse pain and declining physical fitness

ABANDONING WORK AND FUN FOR BOREDOM

once you have taken time off work, and given up your hobbies, you get bored. Your pain will expand to fill the day

STRESS

Stress. is the ultimate multi-tasking sensation: it can make you avoid activity, avoid friends , edge out loved ones: it can make you feel helpless and hopeless. It can lay the foundations for arguments and anger, and given time will deliver you mental health issue such as anxiety and depression

WAITING FOR A CURE, or HOPING THAT THE PAIN WILL GO AWAY

Rather than simply doing the basic combination of stretches, smashes, movement education and strengthening that I can show you, You start obsessing about a “cure”. You chase your doctor for a magical MRI or a spinal fusion , even if you know that only 1 out of 250 MRI’s show anything remotely useful, and normally leads to a recommendation to stretch and build your core.

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