Changing Your Outlook

By editor | March 7, 2008

Arthritis, by its very nature, induces stress: It changes the familiar patterns of your life; it can make you feel as though you have little control. You hurt, you can’t do all the things you used to do, and you may even look somewhat different.

Sometimes people give up activities simply because they can no longer do them at their accustomed pace. A better solution is to approach the activity in a new way: If going out for dinner exhausts you, go out for coffee instead. If you desperately miss dancing, try a single dance or slow dancing, or sign up for a class in t’ ai chi, a graceful and dancelike (but non-impact) Chinese art. Return to your weight lifting program by starting off with very light weights and gradually increasing them as your joints permit.

In some cases, you may have to shift your sights to reinvolve yourself in a beloved pastime. This also works with less appealing activities such as housework.

Researchers have found that most of us can cope pretty well with things as long as we believe we have the resources to handle them. It’s when we conclude that the problems are beyond our capacity to manage that stress takes over. So the ticket here, as cliched as it sounds, is to think positively. Not only can this make you feel better emotionally, but it will make you feel better physically, too.

Dealing with pain itself can be emotionally debilitating. Without realizing it, you can make the pain worse by tensing up, anticipating and dreading it. If you think, “This is going to hurt,” before you get up, you’re basically priming the pump for pain. And fear can actually increase its severity.

Likewise, feelings of worthlessness, a sense of guilt at slowing down your partner, or negative thoughts such as, “No one understands what I’m going through,” increase the likelihood that you’re going to feel rotten both mentally and physically.

Pain may seem straightforward, but it’s not that simple. There’s a “gate control” theory of pain that helps explain why soldiers wounded in battle may feel little or no pain when it happens, while amputees may feel excruciating agony in limbs that are no longer even there. The idea is that you have a nerve “gate” in your spine. When some thing hurts, the nervous system sends pain signals toward the brain through the spinal cord. If the gate is open, the pain signal gets through; if it’s closed, it doesn’t.

And believe it or not, what you feel and think has been proven to affect the opening or closing of this gate.


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Topics: Arthritis |

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