Health & Medical Pain Diseases

How Stress Affects Lower Back Pain

Lower back pain is common and most adults have suffered from it at some point in their life.
Chronic pain is any type of pain that last for an extended amount of time.
The pain that you feel is actually a symptom caused by some type of injury or disease but in some cases, this pain is a symptom created by having too much stress in your life.
Stress Can Create Pain or Make It Worse Did you know that stress could affect pain in two different ways? It can create the pain you're feeling or it can make an existing pain caused from an injury or disease worse.
Your body and mind work together as one and when the emotional side of your brain becomes too stressed, you could begin feeling pain in your lower back, neck, shoulders or some other part of the body.
This type of pain is very real.
The brain uses it as a type of defense mechanism designed to distract you from the stress because the pain is less destructive to your overall health and well-being than the stress is.
Simply put, your brain is protecting itself from a lifetime of stress.
If you're suffering from pain in your lower back or other areas of your body, stress can make this pain worse than it should be.
It won't make the actual condition worse but it can make the pain more intense.
Why and How Stress Affects Pain To understand how stress affects pain, you need to understand why and how it happens.
People are subjected to stress at a very early age.
Stress is created by everything from becoming angry over something to grief over the loss of a loved one.
After going through a stressful time, it becomes a bad memory that's stored in your unconscious mind.
Over the years, these memories begin to build and eventually they start to surface to the conscious mind.
As a way for your brain to prevent this from happening, it decreases the blood flow to a certain part of the body such as the lower back.
Restricted blood flow reduces the amount of oxygen sent to this part of the body.
Less oxygen causes waste products to build up in the tissues around the spine and before long pain will develop in that area.
The pain will then take the focus from the memories trying to surface and put it on the pain.
This pain is very real but it will not cause any permanent damage to that area of the body.
This whole process occurs because the brain sees this pain as being less dangerous to the body than what the effect would be if these unconscious memories surfaced.
It's designed to protect you, even though the pain can be severe and last for a long time.
Everyone has stress in one form or another.
It's part of life and there is no way to avoid it.
However, there are ways to reduce or eliminate the lower back pain caused by stress.


Leave a reply