“Nothing happens until the pain of remaining the same outweighs the pain of change.”
Arthur Burt
Have you ever thought about how grateful you should be for the physical pain that you experience in life? Some of you may be scoffing right now, wondering “Where on earth is he going with this? There is no way I like the pain I have!”
You have to stop and think about pain as deeper than what you feel. Why do you have pain? It is your body’s way of notifying you when something is wrong. For years I have shared with the public in classes that if you were to sit on a hot burner on the stove, I would hope you’d feel it before you’d smell it!
Some of you may be laughing, thinking of that as purely a joke, but in reality the inability to process pain correctly is a very big issue indeed. In fact, it bears to mention that those of you who have a “high-pain threshold” should be particularly concerned. You are the ones that have a greater ability to “push through it” when you have pain, whatever joint or area of the spine is giving you symptoms. You reference yourself as tough, but it only means that by waiting until your pain is high enough to cause you to act, the problem is much, much greater. That is not such a positive position to be in.
It’s important to understand some basic neurology. When it comes to nerves, you have three different types, simply classified as Class A, Class B, and Class C nerves fibers. Class C fibers also get the distinction of being referred to as nociceptive fibers, which some simply call “pain” fibers. Interestingly enough, your Class C fibers compose roughly only 10% of your nerve structure.
That’s it.
The other 90% of your nerves are focused on all sorts of muscle control and internal function of all of your bodily systems, like your five senses, digesting, heart beating, lungs breathing, liver detoxifying, and much more. Imagine for a moment, if you pressed on your nerves enough that they lit up your Class C nerve fibers, there would be a strong likelihood that something else in your body wouldn’t be working at 100% because there’s pressure enough to get to the measly 10% of them.
That is why regular chiropractic care is so beneficial even when you aren’t in pain, because it gives your chiropractor a chance to find problems before they become pains. It also means that when you do have pain, don’t ignore it or necessarily try to suppress it with drugs just so that you can continue to ignore it.
That’s how to let a problem get bigger. You are worth so much more than that. There is a positive power to pain. If you listen to it and take healthy steps towards resolution, it then is your friend in the process.
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