Mind and Body Communication

Although this isn't directly related to pain relief it does highlight how our mind and body communicate in different ways.

Obviously we have our nervous system but there's a clue about a different way they communicate. When we go to sleep at night our mind initiates sleep paralysis to stop us acting out our dreams. But prior to initiating sleep paralysis our brain must make sure that we are actually asleep. What it does is send a signal to roll over, if we then carry out that command it will wait a while and then resend the same message. This is where the term 'tossing and turning' comes from when someone is unable to get to sleep. They are receiving that urge to turn over from the brain, to check that the body has gone to sleep.

Once we ignore the urge to turn over the brain then sends other signals to double check that we are truly asleep. It sends pain signals! If we ignore those pain signals then it is satisfied that we are asleep and sleep paralysis will be 'turned on', but it does send quite ferocious pain.

Try this out, when you go to bed ignore that 'urge' to turn over and just lay still. It won't be long before you start getting some really uncomfortable feelings and pain.

So the moral to this is, if we can identify how to effectively communicate with our brain, we can talk in its language and have it do what we want. Ultimately we want it to stop the pain NOW, and it does - within seconds!