The Natural Pain Relief

The Natural Pain Relief

Taken from www.consciousbreathing.com

Not many people are aware of the fact that human beings have in their power the possibility to not feel pain or to minimize it. There is a way by which people can actually play a role in not feeling pain with their own body, and not with painkillers. The body is designed to react in order to thrive in any circumstances given by the environment. Nevertheless, it is not used to the amount of stress we put ourselves through today. Pain and stress cause the same response in our body. The Pain Management Health Center in WebMD explains that “Pain and stress have a similar effect on the body: your heart rate and blood pressure rise, breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your muscles tighten.” Therefore, when we are stressed or in pain, our whole body is tensed and alert, and it is waiting for the pain or stressor to go, so that it can relax.

Sadly, we do not allow our bodies to get back into a relaxation state because, we are in constant stress. Chronic stress, such as worrying about what might happen or what did happen, or fearing the future, causes the body to be in a constant state of tension and can never actually recuperate. When our body is relaxed, our heart rate slows down and our vital functions begin to work normally. Something really important to remember, is that the body has its own relaxation technique to help itself regenerate. This technique is exhaling. When we inhale, the sympathetic nervous system activates, and with that the alert response that also activates when we are under stress. While when we exhale, the parasympathetic nervous system activates and allows the body to turn on its long term functions such as digestion and the immune system. Therefore, it is like a vicious cycle; when we are stressed we breath faster, and since we breath faster, the parasympathetic nervous system shuts down and with that our regeneration.

A post on the DailyMail says that, “Most healthy adults take between 12 and 18 breaths a minute. But new research shows that slowing this down to as few as six a minute can have a powerful pain-busting effect.” They did a study on healthy middle-aged women and women who had fibromyalgia, where they wanted to measure how much pain they could tolerate. They found that when they breathed slowly, they rated the pain as less intense as when they breathed normally.

Taken from www.fix.com

This is in fact a novel finding, because the only thing it takes it’s breathing slower. There are several ways by which people can relax themselves, but this is one of the easiest and the handiest at every moment of our days. When we feel stressed, we only need to remember that exhaling triggers the relaxation response in our bodies, and it can also help us stop worrying. Andrew R. Block, PhD comments on Spine-Health that, “Learning to relax takes practice, especially when you are in pain, but it is definitely worth it to be able to release muscle tension throughout the body and start to remove attention from the pain.” This is how we can achieve pain relief in a natural way.