By definition, chronic pain persists longer than three months — a constant toll on your physical and mental health. One in four people with chronic pain ends up with Chronic Pain Syndrome, where they begin developing other health symptoms beyond pain. Their chronic pain becomes exacerbated by other issues, including depression, anxiety, insomnia, exhaustion, and irritability.
So, logically, you need to find ways to manage your pain before you fix it. Keep reading for nine easy ways to ease your pain that you can incorporate into your daily routine.
Nine Easy Ways to Manage Pain
1. Take a Bath
Try adding Epsom salts to your bath for a relaxing soak. This easy-to-find holistic remedy may help reduce inflammation in people with arthritis, tension headaches, and chronic back pain.
2. Get a Massage
The gentle strokes and relaxing environment are also helpful for lowering stress levels. Stress and the high cortisol levels that result worsen chronic pain by increasing systemic inflammation, tightening muscles, and limiting mobility.
3. Practice Yoga
Yoga is particularly beneficial because it connects the mind and body. For example, by practicing breathwork and mindfulness, you change your brain's perception of pain when you engage your mind during movement.
4. Use a Kailo Patch
The patch targets the pain receptors in the affected area, and scientists theorize that it works by interrupting the body’s electrical signals. Topical pain relief solutions like Kailo are easy-to-use and convenient alternatives to traditional oral pain medications.
5. Pick Up Meditation
Studies have shown that you increase your pain threshold when you consciously put your awareness on your pain. In addition, this seemingly simple act helps you relax, which triggers your brain to release the feel-good hormones called endorphins.
6. Go to Physical Therapy
Once they help you diagnose the problem, they offer various solutions. For example, a visit to the physical therapist might include any combination of physical exercises to increase strength and passive therapies like massage and laser therapy to reduce inflammation.
7. Try Acupuncture
In several studies where practitioners treated common chronic pain issues like shoulder pain and chronic headaches, patients saw an improvement in their symptoms. However, benefits from treatment only increased when patients went to acupuncture consistently.
8. Practice Gratitude
Gratitude influences chronic pain by changing your outlook on everything in your life, from your relationships to how you feel about your body. Active, positive thinking reprograms the brain, even if we don't fully understand how.
9. Drink Herbal Teas
These teas contain potent antioxidants to reduce inflammation and prevent cell damage. Turmeric tea, for example, includes a powerful polyphenol called curcumin that reduces inflammation to help treat chronic pro-inflammatory diseases like cancer and arthritis that might cause lasting pain.