Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
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Realistic chronic pain management
We’ve had a number of requests to do a main feature on managing chronic pain, so here it is!
A quick (but important) note before we begin:
Obviously, not all chronic pain is created equal. Furthermore, we know that you, dear reader with chronic pain, have been managing yours for however long you have, learning as you go. You also doubtlessly know your individual condition inside out.
We also know that people with chronic health conditions in general are constantly beset by well-meaning unsolicited advice from friends and family, asking if you’ve heard about [thing you heard about 20 years ago] that will surely change your life and cure you overnight.
It’s frustrating, and we’re going to try to avoid doing that here, while still offering the advice that was asked for. We ask you, therefore, to kindly overlook whatever you already knew, and if you already knew it all, well, we salute you and will not be surprised if that’s the case for at least some readers. Chronic pain’s a… Well, it’s a chronic pain.
All that said, let’s dive in…
How are you treating your body right now?
Are you hydrated; have you eaten; are you standing/sitting/lying in a position that at least should be comfortable for you in principle?
The first two things affect pain perception; the latter can throw a spanner in the works if something’s not quite right.
Move your body (gently!)
You know your abilities, so think about the range of motion that you have, especially in the parts of your body that hurt (if that’s “everywhere”, then, our sympathies, and we hope you find the same advice applies). Think about your specific muscles and joints as applicable, and what the range of motion is “supposed” to be for each. Exercise your range of motion as best you can (gently!) to the point of its limit(s) and/or pain.
- If you take it past that limit, there is a good chance you will make it worse. You don’t want that.
- If you don’t take it to the limit, there is a good chance your range of movement will deteriorate, and your “safe zone” (i.e., body positions that are relatively free from pain) will diminish. You definitely don’t want that, either.
Again, moderation is key. Yes, annoying as the suggestion may be, such things as yoga etc can help, if done carefully and gently. You know your limits; work with those, get rest between, and do what you can.
For most people this will at least help keep the pain from getting worse.
Hot & Cold
Both of these things could ease your pain… Or make it worse. There is an element of “try it and see”, but here’s a good general guide:
Here’s How to Choose Between Using Ice or Heat for Pain
Meditation… Or Distraction
Meditating really does help a lot of people. In the case of pain, it can be counterintuitively helpful to focus for a while on the sensation of the pain… But in a calm, detached fashion. Without judgement.
“Yes, I am experiencing pain. Yes, it feels like I’m being stabbed with hot knives. Yes, this is tortuous; wow, I feel miserable. This truly sucks.”
…it doesn’t sound like a good experience, does it? And it’s not, but paying it attention this way can paradoxically help ease things. Pain is, after all, a messenger. And in the case of chronic pain, it’s in some ways a broken messenger, but what a messenger most needs is to be heard.
The above approach a) is good b) may have a limit in how long you can sustain it at a time, though. So…
The opposite is a can be a good (again, short-term) approach too. Call a friend, watch your favorite movie, play a video game if that’s your thing. It won’t cure anything, but it can give you a little respite.
Massage
Unless you already know this makes your pain worse, this is a good thing to try. It doesn’t have to be a fancy spa; if the nature of your pain and condition permits, you can do self-massage. If you have a partner or close friend who can commit to helping, it can be very worth them learning to give a good massage. There are often local courses available, and failing that, there is also YouTube.
Here’s an example of a good video for myofascial release massage, which can ease a lot of common kinds of chronic pain:
Some quick final things to remember:
- If you find something helps, then it helps, do that.
- That goes for mobility aids and other disability aids too, even if it was designed for a different disability. If it helps, it helps. You’re not stealing anyone’s thunder (or resources) by using something that makes your life easier. We’re not in this life to suffer!
- There is no such thing as “this pain is not too much”. The correct amount of pain is zero. Maybe your body won’t let you reach zero, but more than that is “too much” already.
- You don’t have to be suffering off the scale to deserve relief from pain
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Butter vs Ghee – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing butter to ghee, we picked the butter.
Why?
Assuming a comparable source for each—e.g. butter from grass-fed cows, or ghee made from butter from grass-fed cows—both have a mostly comparable nutritional profile.
Note: the above is not a safe assumption to make in the US, unless you’re paying attention. Grass-fed cows are not the norm in the US, so it’s something that has to be checked for. On the other hand, ghee is usually imported, and grass-fed cows are the norm in most of the rest of the world, including the countries that export ghee the most. So if “buying blind”, ghee will be the safer bet. However, checking labels can overcome this.
Many of the Internet-popular health claims for ghee are exaggerated. For example, yes it contains butyrate… But at 1% or less. You’d be better off getting your butyrate from fibrous fruit and vegetables. Yes it contains medium-chain triglycerides (that’s also good), but in trace amounts. It even has conjugated linoleic acid, but you guessed it, the dose is insignificant.
Meanwhile, both butter and ghee contain heart-unhealthy animal-based saturated fats (which are usually worse for the health than some, but not all, of their plant-based equivalents). However…
- A tablespoon of butter contains about 7 grams of saturated fat
- A tablespoon of ghee contains about 9 grams of saturated fat
So, in this case, “ghee is basically butter, but purer” becomes a bad thing (and the deciding factor between the two).
There is one reason to choose butter over ghee, but it’s not health-related—it simply has a higher smoke point, as is often the case for fats that have been more processed compared to fats that have been less processed.
In short: either can be used in moderation, but even 2 tbsp of butter are taking an average person (because it depends on your metabolism, so we’ll say average) to the daily limit for saturated fats already, so we recommend to go easy even on that.
Want to know more?
Take care!
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ADHD For Smart Ass Women – by Tracy Otsuka
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We’ve reviewed books about ADHD in adults before, what makes this one different? It’s the wholly female focus. Which is not to say some things won’t apply to men too, they will.
But while most books assume a male default unless it’s “bikini zone” health issues, this one is written by a woman for women focusing on the (biological and social) differences in ADHD for us.
A strength of the book is that it neither seeks to:
- over-medicalize things in a way that any deviation from the norm is inherently bad and must be fixed, nor
- pretend that everything’s a bonus, that we are superpowered and beautiful and perfect and capable and have no faults that might ever need addressing actually
…instead, it gives a good explanation of the ins and outs of ADHD in women, the strengths and weaknesses that this brings, and good solid advice on how to play to the strengths and reduce (or at least work around) the weaknesses.
Bottom line: this book has been described as “ADHD 2.0 (a very popular book that we’ve reviewed previously), but for women”, and it deserves that.
Click here to check out ADHD for Smart Ass Women, and fall in love with your neurodivergent brain!
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Your Future Self – by Dr. Hal Herschfield
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How do you want to be, one year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now?
Now, how would you have answered that same question one, five, ten years ago?
The reality, according to Dr. Hal Herschfield, is that often we go blundering into the future blindly, because we lack empathy with our future self. Our past self, we can have strong feelings about. They could range from compassion to shame, pride to frustration, but we’ll have feelings. Our future self? A mystery.
What he proposes in this book, therefore, is not merely the obvious “start planning now, little habits that add up”, etc, but also to address the underlying behavioral science of why we don’t.
Starting with exercises of empathy for our tomorrow-self (literally tomorrow, i.e. the day after this one), and building a mindset of “paying it forward”—to ourself.
By treating our future self like a loved one, we can find ourselves a lot more motivated to actually do the things that future-us will thank us for.
The real value of this book is in the progressive exercises, because it’s a “muscle” that most people haven’t exercised much. But when we do? What a superpower it becomes!
Bottom line: if you know what you “should” do, but somehow just don’t do it, this book will help connect you to your future self and work as a better team to get there… the way you actually want.
Click here to check out Your Future Self, and start by gifting this book to future-you!
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The Better Brain – by Dr. Bonnie Kaplan and Dr. Julia Rucklidge
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We’ve reviewed books about eating for brain health before, but this is the first time we’ve reviewed one written by clinical psychologists.
What does that change? Well, it means it less focus on, say, reducing beta amyloid plaques, and more on mental health—which often has a more immediate impact in our life.
In the category of criticisms, the authors do seem to have a bit of a double-standard. For example, they criticise psychiatrists prescribing drugs that have only undergone 12-week clinical trials, but they cite a single case-study of a 10-year-old boy as evidence for a multivitamin treating his psychosis when antipsychotics didn’t work.
However, the authors’ actual dietary advice is nonetheless very respectable. Whole foods, nutrients taken in synergistic stacks, cut the sugar, etc.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn about the impact good nutrition can have on the brain’s health, ranging from diet itself to dietary supplements, this book presents many avenues to explore.
Click here to check out “The Better Brain”, and eat for the good health of yours!
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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – by Dr. Lindsay Gibson
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Not everyone had the best of parents, and the harm done can last well beyond childhood. This book looks at healing that.
Dr. Gibson talks about four main kinds of “difficult” parents, though of course they can overlap:
- The emotional parent, with their unpredictable outbursts
- The driven parent, with their projected perfectionism
- The passive parent, with their disinterest and unreliability
- The rejecting parent, with their unavailability and insults
For all of them, it’s common that nothing we could do was ever good enough, and that leaves a deep scar. To add to it, the unfavorable dynamic often persists in adult life, assuming everyone involved is still alive and in contact.
So, what to do about it? Dr. Gibson advocates for first getting a good understanding of what wasn’t right/normal/healthy, because it’s easy for a lot of us to normalize the only thing we’ve ever known. Then, beyond merely noting that no child deserved that lack of compassion, moving on to pick up the broken pieces one by one, and address each in turn.
The style of the book is anecdote-heavy (case studies, either anonymized or synthesized per common patterns) in a way that will probably be all-too-relatable to a lot of readers (assuming that if you buy this book, it’s for a reason), science-moderate (references peppered into the text; three pages of bibliography), and practicality-dense—that is to say, there are lots of clear usable examples, there are self-assessment questionnaires, there are worksheets for now making progress forward, and so forth.
Bottom line: if one or more of the parent types above strikes a chord with you, there’s a good chance you could benefit from this book.
Click here to check out Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and rebuild yourself!
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The Sprout Book – by Doug Evans
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Sprouting seeds are more nutritious than most people think, and “seeds” is also a much broader category than people think. Beyond even chia and sunflower and such, this book bids us remember that onions do not just appear on supermarket shelves fully formed (to give just one example of many); most plants come from seeds and of those, most can be usefully sprouted.
The author, most well-known for his tech companies, here is selling us a very low-tech health kick with very little profit to be found except for our health. By sprouting seeds of many kinds at home, we can enjoy powerful superfoods that are not only better than, but also cheaper than, most supplements.
Nor are the benefits of sprouting things marginal; we’re not talking about a 1–10% increase in bioavailable so much as what’s often a 100–1000% increase.
After explaining the science and giving a primer on sprouting things for oneself, there is a wide selection of recipes, but the biggest benefit of the book is in just getting the reader up-and-running with at-home sprouting.
Bottom line: if you like the idea of letting food be your medicine and even like the idea of essentially growing your own food with zero gardening skills, then this is an excellent book for you.
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