The Neurology of Pain

Welcome to Illuminated. Today we will transfer the landscape of life and the experience that brings us all together. I'm your host Jennifer Wallace and I hope you enjoy this conversation. Elizabeth Kristoff is an expert in using applied neurology to move people out of pain, unwanted behavior, trauma response and stress. She is the founder of Brain Based Wellness, a revolutionary online platform that trains the nervous system and body to resolve old patterns, improve performance and increase well-being. Elizabeth is a Pilates Method Alliance certified teacher who has been in the movement industry since 2007 and has practiced applied neurology for athletic performance since 2015. But it was when she lost her fitness studio and became the full-time caretaker for a partner with rare cancer and PTSD that she got a first-hand look at how a dysregulated nervous system damaged by trauma can lead to disease, mental illness and unwanted behavior. Coming face to face with her own trauma responses like disassociation and binge eating, let her down a path of somatic, body-based healing and implementing applied neurology for behavioral change and trauma resolution. After bringing her research and worked hundreds of clients, she has learned that each body, mind and nervous system are both unique and capable of healing. Hey Elizabeth, let's tell our listeners about the new addition to our morning routine and all about illuminated new sponsor athletic greens. Yes, I'm loving it and actually I have to make a confession. I have it twice a day. I know you're supposed to have it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, but I end up craving it so much that I actually add it to my smoothie later too. I love it too. It's delicious. I know there's hesitation sometimes around a green drink, but athletic greens has curated a comprehensive formula that helps us adapt as our daily needs change due to stress, sleep patterns or an imperfect diet and I think they've really knocked it out of the park. Yeah, it's actually become an important part of my morning ritual. So I like to practice gratitude when I drink water first thing in the morning and just to give thanks for the life sustaining water so that I can create that mindset habitually and daily. But now I've started adding my athletic greens to the water and it really feels so nourishing. Like I'm really caring for myself. And as I'm stirring it is actually the perfect amount of time to practice gratitude. So I give thanks during that time for all of my intrinsic blessings like my broth or my nervous system firing or my blood flowing or my heart beating or my skin feeling and it really sets up my day to practice radical self love by giving to myself first thing in the morning and baking in this intrinsic not material oriented gratitude for life. Like for the fact that I'm alive. Wow, that's really beautiful. And you know what makes it so nourishing in the body? It's comprised of 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food super ingredients. As a cancer survivor, it's really important to me that I only put the most high quality ingredients into my body and athletic greens is NSF certified. And that means it goes through rigorous testing with not only every batch but every ingredient. Y'all, it's great for me is that it's gluten free, nut free, sugar free, dairy free and egg free. So it's great addition for any lifestyle or for those of us with food allergies like my celiac and it's super clean tasting and it offers immune support. Yes, it's got prebiotics and probiotics and a daily serving of what the body requires in essential minerals and fatty acids for the management of blood sugar levels. And the adaptogens in it are these high quality herbs that help protect against the effects of stress, which means it also helps to normalize sleep patterns, regulate hormones and lower physical and mental fatigue. And as we know and as we talk about reducing chronic stress benefits cognition, memory, health overall and really the nervous system as a whole. And you know what, we are not alone in loving athletic greens. Trusted by top athletes and performers head on over to athleticgreens.com/illuminatedpodcast and get started on your daily dose of nutritional insurance. The link will be in the show notes. All right, y'all, let's jump into today's episode. Today I'm joined by Elizabeth Kristoff from Brain Based Wellness and we're going to talk about pain. The neurology of pain and how pain is an output signal from your brain to take action. The brain lives in a paradigm of safe or unsafe. It relies on information systems and input and we're going to talk all about those systems and how the brain filters the information it's given to produce an output one such as pain. Whether you've got acute pain or are living with chronic pain, you're going to want to listen to this conversation. We'll talk about why pushing into pain is dangerous. We'll dive into the way and how you think about your pain can offset your sensitization to pain. And we all have thoughts and emotions are yours affecting your pain level. I was recently in an accident where I was rollerblading without a helmet and split my head open, landing me with six staples in my head. I was able to move really quickly out of the pain within four days of the accident using applied neurology, but also with visualization techniques of healing and a lot of awareness as to where my thoughts and emotions were sitting around the accident. I think all affect the positive healing experience that I had. So today Elizabeth is going to talk to us about pain, how pain works in the brain and like I said, whether your pain is acute or chronic, you're going to want to hear some of this information. So welcome Elizabeth. I'd Jennifer, thanks for having me back and I just want to say again how impressed I am with you and the way that you handled your healing. You took a really integrated approach to your healing. You addressed your nervous system and just like you said, you also addressed your mindset and did visualization and you really took some agency over healing yourself. I just think that's so inspiring and I'm also just really glad that you're doing better. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think both of us have some really incredible healing stories around applied neurology and moving out of pain and then also with that intertangled web of how we think. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the most important things as we're going into this episode is just kind of understanding that what we're going to do is have a conversation about pain as an integrated output of your nervous system that there's no like one particular area of your body that creates pain and that also just understanding more about what pain is, what purpose it serves and how it works in your brain and your body can actually help you to reduce the pain that you're experiencing. So just taking some time to educate yourself on what pain is, how it works, how your brain and your body work can actually make you feel better. It's remarkable. It's really, really remarkable. It's so interesting how intrinsic all of the systems are. So everything is woven together. Let's start from the really basic basics because pain lives in your brain as a signal. There's not something in your knee or in your hip or in your back that's like, hey, there's pains right here. I need help. It's right. Pain is at its most basic level and output of your brain and your nervous system when they're under too much threat, trying to get you to take action about something. So sometimes that can be a biomechanical issue, but it can be a lot of other things as well. So if you have a acute injury or you're experiencing a lot of pain, definitely it's important to go get that checked out and make sure that there's not something, you know, seriously arrive that you need to look at as to what's going on. But a lot of times after we have an injury, that pain lives on for a long time after the injury has healed after the tissue has healed or will have an injury that flares up and then it goes away or we have pain that migrates around, right? Like, oh, I was had neck pain and then that went away and all of a sudden I had shoulder pain. And so what we are going to do is reframe looking at that pain as an output rather than an input. That's a real different way to think about pain. So if you think about the fact that the brain's primary job and again, we're always here when we say that talking about your old brain, your survival brain is to keep you alive, to keep you safe. And it's always deciding safe or unsafe. How dangerous is this? And then it's taking the information that comes in from all of your sensory systems. So that could be from the skin and the tissue, but it could also be from your eyes. It could be from your balance system inside of your ear. It could be from your interceptive system, which is the system that gives information to your brain from like your guts and your respiration from all your organs. It takes in all that sensory input from those different systems and it integrates it. And then it produces an output. And if it has some reason to feel like things are not safe, like there's some kind of threat to your well-being, pain is a really good output that your brain can produce to try to get you to change your behavior to a way that keeps you safer. We're specifically going to talk about pain in this episode, but what are some other outputs that your brain will express to make you stop doing things, just so people can have a sort of an idea. Absolutely. I think there's all kinds of protective outputs. Pain is a really effective one and our brain is usually going to try to go for what's going to get us to change our behavior and take action the fastest. So pain's great, right? If you experience pain, you're going to immediately maybe take smaller steps, have less interaction with the world, not work out with as much intensity. So if your brain's trying to reduce stimulus, that's a great way. But there's lots of other protective outputs that your brain can produce to get you to change behavior to keep you. your world smaller. So you could get really tired, you could experience extreme fatigue, you could get dizzy or nauseous and have to maybe go lay down or, you know, if you're on a boat and you get nausea, that's going to make you get off the boat and get on stable land where there's less challenges to the balance system in your inner ear, right? So that's another way to get you to change your behavior. It could even look like unwanted behaviors like binge eating or depression laying down, putting the covers over your head, walking out the world. All these are ways to either regulate your nervous system in some way that your brain needs or to get you to reduce the amount of interaction that you're having with the world in that moment to keep you safe. So it's not really thinking about your long-term goals. It's thinking about like right now, I'm under too much threat. How can I do something to decrease the amount of stimulus, the amount of stress or threat coming into the system so that we stay safe right now? And I think it's really interesting too that we'll even push through pain. People push through pain all the time, whether that, especially I think when people are used to living with a low level of chronic pain all the time, it's just like, well, whatever, I've still got to go to work or I'm still, you know, want to work out or garden or do whatever it is in my daily day. But why is that dangerous? Well, like we said before, pain is a signal that there's too much stress coming into the nervous system. And we can talk in a little bit about what are some of the things that cause that stress. But it's a signal from your body that there's too much stress and too much stress for too long chronic stress. This regulates our nervous system and it can often lead to disease. It can lead to harmful behaviors in order to try to self-regulate emotional reactivity. And so our brain knows that too much stress for too long is dangerous. It's going to first start with that signal, like maybe knee pain to try to get you to change your behavior. But the body speaks real quietly at first. And if we keep ignoring those signals, the body's going to start to speak a little bit louder until it's being very loudly so the pain can get very severe or worse, we can move into disease or we can move into really harmful behaviors, things that we don't want to do. But we have ignored the softer signals and now it's taking action to try harder to get us to listen. I think it's interesting like a lot of people like when I was just talking about the recent rollerblading accident that I had. And I think people were really surprised that I was able to move out of pain so quickly. Being that I had like staples in my head, whiplash. And so as I was researching for this episode and going through some z-health stuff that you sent me, something I just find fascinating because people sometimes just brush off the applied neurology. Maybe it's like some sort of magic show or something like that, but there are 35 miles of nerves in our bodies that act as a super highway system. And there's always a baseline level of electrical current of activity in our nerves. And so depending on what stimulus is coming in, like if you're moving, if you're sore, if you have an injury or whatever that is, then that current level goes up. And when it goes up enough so that your brain feels pain, that's a lot of electrical current being sent into your brain to say, hey, no, stop. Yeah, I think you have a really good point that sometimes these seem like parlor tricks or something like ghost pokers and make you look up into the right and all of a sudden you have better range of motion or you're more flexible or your pain goes away. So this brings down a little bit of the science behind how that really works, right? So there's no particular area of your brain that processes pain. There's not like your pain center. What you do have is you have no susceptors, which are not pain receptors, but threat receptors. So like maybe you touch something really hot. They send that signal to your brain or maybe something is really sharp. They send that signal to your brain or maybe there's tissue damage. They send that signal to your brain, but they don't have pain signals. They're just telling you that something is threatening. And so that information, along with all of your other sensory information, the information coming in from your eyes, from the balance system in your inner ear, from your skin, from your organs, all of that information is always going up to the brain. And the brain is taking it all in and making a decision safe or unsafe. And that information is processed in a bunch of different areas of your brain. And pain is an interpretation of your brain that it's under too much threat. What we do in applied neurology is not just train those sensory systems or look at the tissue or the biomechanics, but we look at the other systems that provide input to the brain too, like your eyes and your balance system in your inner ear, so that if we can improve that information coming into your brain and make your brain feel like that information is safe and reliable and accurate and it's more efficient, then your nervous system feels less threat on a second by second basis. When your nervous system experiences less threat, then it's going to have less need to produce those protective outputs that we talked about to try to get you to reduce your interaction. And I'll give a really practical example of this in terms of just how your other systems can affect your biomechanics. So one of the things that happens is our visual system really affects a lot of the information coming into our brain. It's at the top of the neural hierarchy and the brain really relies on that information to make those predictions that keep you alive. A lot of us right now are looking at a screen that's about 13 inches away from our face all the time or maybe even closer. So our eyes are always in this state of convergence where they're coming in close together like toward your nose, like if you are going to make yourself cross-eyed, right? And what that eye position does is stimulates two cranial nerves, cranial nerve three and four. And those areas go to your midbrain and they really give your midbrain a lot of upregulation. Your midbrain also makes anything that creates flexion in your body really active. If you think about that, what flexes you, your abdominals forward flex your spine and that hunched over position that anterior carriage of the head, your hip flexors getting really tight. So if I stretch my hip flexors or if I try to improve my posture by doing back extension every once in a while to strengthen my extensor strength, but I'm still looking at a computer screen and keeping my eyes in that state of convergence all the time, I'm not going to be able to override that and my hip flexors are going to stay tight and it's going to affect my posture. Wow, that's interesting. And the rounding of the shoulders, I guess goes in with that too. We see a lot of that with people, even just looking down when you see people walking and looking down at their phones, you can really see that posture that you're describing really clearly. Yeah, and it's too hard to try to override it just by trying to strengthen the opposing muscles or come out it from a biomechanics standpoint. When really what's happening is it's because of the information from the eyes that's going into the brain. So what you really need to train is the visual system. Right, I would imagine too for someone who shares out a computer all day long that the peripheral visual system would feel easily threatened several times, which I mean, you think about like when you're driving even like how much you rely on your peripheral system, but if you're constantly just looking at something. That's a really great point. And one of the best ways to counteract some of this is to train your peripheral system because again, everything is a skill and it's trainable, but also if we don't actively use it, we lose it. And because our bodies are wired for efficiency, so your peripheral vision skills will start to deteriorate if you're never using them. So a great way to improve some of this is to just go for a walk outside and try to see how much you can see in your peripheral vision or take your thumbs out to the side and maybe wiggle them and see like how far you can take them out and still see them with your face and your eyes facing straightforward and see if you can gradually increase that over time or just step outside and focus on something that's really far away too. Change your focal range to something that's way off in the distance and do that occasionally so that your visual system is getting some different training. Wow, it's so interesting and your eyes are, I mean, you've just taken so much stimulation. Yeah, and also too when our eyes get really tired from all this screen time, then our brain makes our entire body tired, our cognitive brain tired as well because again, it really relies on that information to make us feel safe or it relies on that information to make predictions and produce an output that's intended to keep us alive. And so if that really important system is starting to fatigue out, then your brain's going to try to shut the whole thing down. It's going to say, this is too dangerous. This really important system is fatiguing out. Let's just make you really tired. Why don't you go to bed or why don't you get a migraine and not have to keep straining your eyes because this top of the neural hierarchy system is not functioning as well as it should anymore. And I can just hear somebody right now, you know, who's been at work all day staring at the computer screen. They're in discomfort. They're exhausted because their visual system's just been totally exhausted. And then they get home. They don't have any energy for the family, for their kids, for their lives outside of work because they're just so tired. Yeah. And so another great thing to do is sometimes just give your eyes a little reset. You can do rapid blinking or you could take your hands, close out all the light, place your palms over your eyes, and let everything go completely dark. And rest your eyes for like 30 seconds in between Zoom meetings or maybe do some big the eye circles to stretch the muscles in the hips. six muscles around our eyes. Give them some stimulation, stretch them out a little bit, and it seems a little tedious, but it also is incredibly important for your overall wellbeing. You can really start to reduce the amount of pain you experience as well as improve your energy just by taking the time to throughout the day do these short exercises, and it's really worth it. - It really is worth it, 'cause it's a shame spiral for the person that I have in mind having those thoughts about, like I haven't even done anything today, but for your brain, for your system, you've done a ton. - Yes, exactly, exactly. And so just kind of moving back into pain specifically, that's one way that you could reduce pain is by training your visual system so that you're getting better and put on a second-by-second basis, right? So every day if my eye muscles are stronger and the cranial nerves that activate my eyes are getting more stimulus and activation, and they're not moved into a place of hypersensitivity, then your nervous system functions better, and then again, you're decreasing that overall baseline threat level, and your brain doesn't have to produce those protective outputs like pain to keep you safe. - And your brain has a filtering system. - That's right. So our brain not only does it take in all of those inputs, but it filters them through a bunch of different things to make that really important decision, is this safe, is this dangerous? And so that can be your previous experience. So something like, is this something that I have experienced before? Can I predict what's going to happen? Our brain really wants to be able to predict what's gonna happen, and if it's an unknown, that's more threatening to your brain. For example, martial artists practice this a lot, right? They practice getting hurt so that when they do get kicked or hit, it's not as painful to them because their brain has experienced it many times, right? That's this idea of threat inoculation, exposing yourself to something enough that your brain can be like, okay, I've had this happen before, it didn't kill me. It's not that terrible, and I might hurt a little bit, but it's gonna hurt them a lot less than if I'm just walking down the street and someone comes up to me and kicks me in the shin, I'm gonna be extremely startled. It's gonna be very unpredictable. It might seem very dangerous, and so it's gonna really hurt because my brain perceives that there's more threat there. - Right, yeah, that makes total sense. And then how you would be scared to continue to move. I don't have any intentions of rollerblading. That feels terribly unsafe. - Yes, if you went rollerblading again and you fell, even if the fall wasn't very bad, my guess would be that you would experience a great amount of pain because your brain has that previous experience of, oh, the last time this happened like this, something really bad happened to me. And so even if you just fell down and scraped your knee, your pain response might be really intense and it might last a while. You might feel pain in that knee for a long time after it heals up because your brain was incredibly threatened by that. - And I think what's interesting too is that when your brain is under threat, something like your range of motion is not going to be as larger as wide as it typically would be when it's getting in safe information. So then here I'm going out into an activity where I don't feel safe with a faulty system so to speak, right? Because I'm not going to even have the normal range of motion that I would have doing something that's not threatening. I'm just going in already was sort of a loaded. - Bad past experience, a really threatening past experience. And our brain's perception of safety has a huge impact on a range of motion because if you think about it, it's more dangerous to have big range of motion. You can perform better with a big range of motion. For example, if your brain's map of where your body is, it's a little bit blurry, like say in your feet, you have an old injury that you haven't rehabbed or you just wear shoes all the time. So the joints of your feet are not mobile and they're not sending a good signal to your brain about where your foot is in space, then that's a little bit threatening to your brain. And so it's going to want to make your steps smaller because it doesn't know exactly where your foot is going to land. So from your brain's perspective, it's safer to take smaller steps. And how it's going to do that is increase the amount of tension in the muscles at the top of the lever, which is your hip. So if you see like a lot of times older people, their steps start to get smaller. And it's not because our muscles necessarily have to get tighter as we age, it's because they've lost proprioceptive abilities in their feet. They've lost their body mapping system in their feet over time because we're all wearing shoes all the time and our feet become very immobile. And those joints need to stay mobile in order to send a picture of where your foot is in space to your brain. So now our brain is like, oh, I don't know, it's blurry down there. It's not safe to take a big step. Let me tighten these muscles up, reduce the amount of steps and now your hip flexors are really tight all the time. And then you're rolling, your foam rolling, your hip flexor thinking that that's doing anything and that's doing literally nothing except for maybe for like that short few minutes where you might feel some relief. Yeah, exactly. You might get a little bit of reaction relief, but in the end, you might actually make it much worse because your brain has created that tension or those adhesions in the muscle for a protective reason, right? And you're still not making it feel safe with the foam roller. In fact, you're probably creating more threat because now you're giving it all this sensory stimulus that's really intense pressure. And your brain's gonna say, whoa, it's already not safe. Now it's really not safe. I'm gonna tighten up even more. Oh my gosh. Yeah, proper. Like a. (laughing) And so for some people, over time, they might be teaching their brain that it's safe and that's why maybe they'll get some relief with foam rolling, but for a lot of people, I bet that if they've tried to do that over and over again, and their hips just never get better, it's because they're not addressing the source of the problem. Yeah. What are some of the other filters? Let's get back to those. Yeah, so then there's also social and work environment, right? So right now in the world, a lot of people are experiencing uncertainty and change in their jobs, in their finances, in social situations, and change is inherently threatening to your brain again because it functions on pattern recognition to make those predictions to keep you alive. And so all of that uncertainty can actually lead people to feel more threat, the level of their nervous system all the time, and then as a result of that, to experience more pain. So I have a lot of clients that are experiencing more chronic pain right now, and a large part of that is all of the stress of uncertainty that has been going on for quite a long time over the past year and a half. Yeah, do you think that's really starting to tie into perhaps the thoughts and the emotions and how they affect the way that pain is because there is so much threat that activates emotions in people? Yeah. There's no way to really separate emotions from the pain experience as well. Chronic pain is really tied up with the limbic system and also with your insula. So if there was one part of the brain that was really responsible for processing pain, there's not, but if you had to pick one, it would be your insular cortex. And your insular cortex is a key player in your interceptive system, that system that reads all of the signals that your body is sending up to your brain from the inside, right? The signals from your organs, signals from your respiration system, in your heart, in your gut, and what our interceptive system and our insular cortex also do is decide how we feel about those signals. So it interprets how you feel about what you're feeling. So I feel my heart racing, I feel my gut doing something, I feel something going on with my respiration. And it decides like, what does that mean? Is that something that I should be worried about? What is that threatening? Do I need to switch into my sympathetic nervous system into my fight and flight response because something threatening is going on? That's really decided by that system. It controls all of your autonomics, which is your fight and flight and your freeze and then your pair of sympathetic, which brings you out of that. And so our emotions are interpreted in that system about our sensations. And then also too, it's just one big loop, right? Our emotions have a huge effect on the hormones that get cascaded through our body. Emotions are not just thoughts, they're physical reactions in our body. And they have chemical consequences at the level of our physiology. And thinking about what you said about the insular cortex, about how it's interpreting your emotions really also goes back to those filters, right? What's the previous experience? What's the cultural filter around that? And then also what is my social and work environment? How would I need to be in this situation? Because if you're at work and experiencing something, you don't have the opportunity to say, "I need to leave," or, "This isn't working for me," or, "I need to go outside in nature right now and take a walk." Then the stress level begins to build even further because then the anxiety is going to start coming and that's an output. When you start having that stress response, there was a really interesting study done on back pain, and it was a three-year study of thousands of people. And it looked at what all did they have in common, the people who were experiencing pain, right? They looked at their different structural issues, they looked at their lifestyle, they looked at their core strength, and they tried to find like, all these people who are in pain, what do they all have in common? And then they looked at also people who had the same structural abnormalities, but were not experiencing pain. And the one thing that all the people who were experiencing pain had in common, the only completely common factor was how much they hated their job. And that was the common finding. And they found that one of the most correlated things to back pain is a job that you hate. And if you think about that, my guess would be that it was also a really high stress job that made the person dysregulated in their nervous system and experiencing chronic stress over long periods of time. And again, our brain and our nervous system understand that too much stress for too long is dangerous and causes disease. And so what's a great way to get you to not go to work when you normally push through your emotional desire not to go or you know that it's not really good for you, but you're going to go anyway, is if I give you excruciating back pain, if your back is thrown out, you're not going to go. And so your brain is like, check, got it. This is a great way to reduce the amount of stress, which is what it needs to keep you safe in that moment. And I think I don't know what we were talking about recently, but we were talking about those normal abnormalities that most people have a something in their back. Yeah, I mean, is our biomechanics and tissue a factor? Absolutely, right? If there's tissue damage or structural damage, that is sending maybe more of those threat signals up to your brain because something is a rye. However, if your brain doesn't have a lot of other threat, it might not interpret that as that big of a deal. And so there are lots of studies where they've done FMRIs on people who all had tears in their ACL or all had stenosis or all had slip discs in their back. And usually only about 40% experienced the pain while the entire population that they did the FMRIs on have the same structural issues. It just really matters how much other threat the person is under if they're going to experience the pain or not. Yeah, and I would imagine someone who's not getting back to the job that you're under a lot of stress or maybe that is demanding. Even someone who knows that they have a different purpose to live and to serve who's going into this maybe nine to five or this really maybe something finite, whatever it is, you're not living true to yourself. And then that pain is just still feeling exacerbated by really your own unhappiness. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that that causes lots of chemical reactions in your body when you are feeling out of alignment with your truth. And there's really no way to separate our emotional experience from our physical selves and from the health of our body. They're just not clean cut like that. Everything has interplay with everything else. And there's also a lot of research that shows suppressed emotions at the root of chronic pain, especially chronic pain, where people aren't able to find a root cause otherwise, like chronic low back pain or fibromyalgia. And people learning then to express and process their emotions has been one of the most effective ways that people have found to actually resolve that pain. Because again, emotions are physical reactions in our body. And they're not meant to be shoved down. And they're meant to be moved through the body and processed just like you would have any other process in your body. Like you would sneeze or like you would go to the bathroom. You're also supposed to experience emotions. But in our society, we're really taught that that's not okay from a variety of places, whether that's our parents or just society at large, like even someone just like shushing you and you're crying. And so we start to equate certain emotions as bad, like sadness and jealousy and envy. And they're not bad. They're just all part of the human experience. They've only become bad and harmful when they get really internalized. And so there's one other filter. Yeah, there's actually two other filters. Expectations of consequences. So if I have this idea that something really important or bad is going to happen to me as a result of the pain, then I'm going to feel the pain more strongly. So for instance, I use my body for my livelihood. I teach movement on the site every day. And so if I have an injury that's really scary to me because all of a sudden I start thinking about the fact that I'm going to have to pay somebody else to teach for me on the site and that's going to cost me and oh my God, my business might fail and I'm going to go under and I'm going to live under a bridge. I pay six pervival needs. And so if I get hurt, having all of that in my mind, I'm going to experience more pain than somebody else who, if they got hurt, it wouldn't affect their income. It wouldn't affect their daily life that much. They might just have their arm in a cast while they're doing whatever they do at the computer. My experience of the pain will actually be different because of that. That makes total sense. And then our beliefs, right? What we believe the pain means and what our beliefs about the pain are. So that's why educating people about pain is one of the best things you can do to actually make them start to feel a little bit better because it's not that the pain changes. It's that their interpretation of it changes, right? Now all of a sudden, I know that maybe it doesn't mean that something terrible that's about to kill me is happening. It just means I'm under too much threat and I need to find ways to reduce my stress. And then maybe if I do that or if I train my vision or something like that, that the pain will go away. And all of a sudden I'm less like, oh my god, I feel this pain, something terrible is wrong with me and I might die. I think this is really what helped me a lot with my most recent injury is because I do not believe that that was a physical accident. I have hold so many beliefs around what that was. Yeah, I mean, I really felt like I healed so quickly from that head injury. - You had this beautiful attitude of what can I learn from this? What is this here to teach me? And I think that that's one of the most empowering ways that anyone can look at their trauma or their wounds or their pain that then makes your actual physical experience of it different. When you think about it from this lens of curiosity and being teachable, I'm looking at it as something not a gift necessarily, but something that will teach you and inform your life and shape you and just keep asking, like, make me teachable, what can I learn from this? And pain can be a beautiful teacher. - And what I'm also hearing you say, and I've heard say, help say this before too, like pain does not equal injury. - Yeah, it can be that or like, like we said before too, it could be something in your lifestyle. So you could also let the pain teach you that there's some things you might need to change about your life that you're under too much stress for whatever reason. Maybe a relationship is out of alignment or maybe your job is taking too much toll on your health. We giving you too much stress and let your pain be a teacher that something is not okay. And how can you change your life to reduce the amount of chronic stress that you're under and take some action because it's really important. Our bodies are always telling us when we're okay and when we're not and when something maybe needs to change. And when we don't listen to that is when we get in trouble. - I've listened to clients before who are under a lot of chronic pain. They'll go see a doctor. I'm not gonna say which one. And it's a weekly appointment. It's just a weekly appointment and I wonder, to what extent are you gonna visit this doctor? Where's the end of this? Where does that stop? And we're dealing with a really large percentage of the population that have a neck, a back, a knee, a shoulder. And they're also avoiding activities when movement is such a key part of healing. - Yeah, that's two really good important points. One is if you're doing something over and over again and it's not getting better, question that, you know, is it really a biomechanical issue? Or is there something else at the root cause? And maybe go see a professional that looks at things from a neurological perspective. And it doesn't have to be neurologist. You could work with an applied neurology practitioner and also evaluate what else in your life might be elevating that front level. Take some time, maybe even sit with your pain and ask it, ask it what it is teaching you so that you're not just trying to work your way out of pain. I really do believe inside each of us, we know what we need to heal. But we just don't often take the time to sit and listen to it. And then we get caught in these loops of seeking these outside people to fix us. And a lot of times it's just people who are nothing wrong with what they do, but they're just looking at things from a biomechanic perspective. And that just isn't gonna solve it all of the time. - So ask yourself, see if you can ask yourself what you really need. And then again, like seek maybe different help that looks at it from a more integrated holistic perspective because it might not be your knee. And if your knee is in pain, you know, might not be your spine, if your spine is in pain. And then the other important thing about that is the importance of movement, right? We're as human beings, we are designed to move. Movement is incredibly important for the health of our brain, for our body chemistry, for our hormones, for so, so many things. And the problem with pain is our brain is doing it to keep us safe in that second because it's under too much threat, but long term, if we stop moving, our brain stops getting a lot of the stimulus that it needs to stay really healthy and active. And then it starts to get hypersensitive to more stimulus because it's not getting the activation that it needs. And so then your pain gets worse and the way you feel gets worse. Because I mean, you think of like every neuron in your brain is like its own little person and it wants to stay alive. It's like I want to exist. And it needs fuel and it needs activation to stay alive. And so if it's not getting that fuel and activation through movement, if a lot of the areas of your brain need movement. get fuel and activation, then what they're going to start to do is become hypersensitive so that they can get that fuel and activation. They're going to increase what their response to stimulus so that they get more of that activation because they're not getting what they need. And then you start to get really hypersensitive. And then that pain gets even worse. And then you also have mood decline. You don't sleep as well. You don't think as well. You get brain fog. All of these things are affected by lack of movement and it can become a pretty tough loop to get out of. Yeah, definitely for sure, especially when you think once you're cleared, you do need to move because physical activity in all cases across the board is one of the best things that you can do for pain. And I think a lot of times people just stop and freeze because they don't know how to appropriately confront their movement fears. Yes. And then they become more afraid of the movement too. Absolutely. Yeah. One of the best things to you is find a way to dosage your own movement. Right. So that you're not trying to go from not moving at all to running period. Even if it's just down the block, like running is too intense. If you're going from not moving at all, you can do much smaller, much less threatening things to start with to still get stimulus to your motor cortex and to still get those brain systems active. Like you can even do complex circular movements with your hands. You can do finger circles, intentional movement to activate those areas of your brain. So that in a minimum effective dose kind of way, you're starting to bring that movement back and you do that a little bit. Maybe you do some really precise movements of your scapula or movements of your spine to get those mechanoreceptors in the joints, some stimulation. Are you work on your feet with a therapy and a little bit? It doesn't have to be like go squat some really heavy way. You can build up to that and then kind of titrate it so that you're not moving into pain. You're not moving into negative response, but you're teaching your brain that movement is safe. And you can then gradually increase the dosage of movement before moving into negative returns. Yes, I think it's really important just to note for people like if you are interested in working with an applied neurologist like Elizabeth, like we're talking about movements that take minutes of time. A few minutes a day, several times a day can improve your life by 10 folds of what you would do with a normal, with a nor I don't know like a normal maybe something else that you're thinking of. And I mean, we've had hammer grilled digger on the show. She's an applied neurologist. A bunch of wonderful trainers. If I'm not air cup of tea is certainly not everyone's, then there's ones that really focus on athletic performance. There's ones that work with aging populations. There's all kinds and it's such a great system to practice. It really should be that we all take some time to intentionally change our nervous system in a positive direction that we train our nervous system intentionally to heal our deficits because it will dramatically change not only your athletic performance in your pain, but the quality of your life. Yeah, I think that's a beautiful note to end on to. This perfect. Yeah, great. Thank you so much. This is just absolutely fascinating. Thank you for having me. I'm always happy to be here. Yeah, and y'all let us know what you think. Let us know reach out on social media. If you're living in pain, share some of your experiences with us so that we can serve you better. Absolutely. We always want to hear from you. Thanks, y'all. Thank you. I think it's just absolutely fascinating how the brain works and how pain specifically works. She mentioned the feet earlier and having been through chemo treatment. I used to have terrible neuropathy in my feet for years. Then when I think about that's cured down through applied neurology, when I think about how threatening it was, I mean, think of how much you walk every day, like just any of your steps and you do see elderly populations sometimes just kind of shuffling around and now you know why and why maybe foam rolling isn't giving you the long-term effects that you would like for it too. I've also healed a dislocated knee. My rehab did 20 years later and now it is safe and mobile and strong and I don't have those movement fears around my knee anymore. It's just been really interesting the journey that I've been on with applied neurology using it from athletic performance and rehabilitation into behavioral change and as you can see even in the conversation that we just had, it's all an intersected web that we're weaving thoughts and motions. You've got that filter system where your previous experiences are making predictions. You've got cultural filters. There are social and work environmental filters and then also you have expectations of consequences. I think we can all name several of those off easily for ourselves. Then also you have your belief system and you know it's just important to remember that we are chemical, we're electric, we are energy, we are emotional, like the human body has so much going on and there's other ways forward. If the way that you are doing things isn't working or bringing the result that you really desire, try something else, try something new. Start working with a new practitioner. I've been working with Elizabeth for years so I can't say enough about her but ladies if there's a gentleman in your life, we have a number of people that we can refer your partners to or you to just reach out to us and share your stories with us. We want to hear from you and if you like this episode please leave us a five star review, leave us a few words if you like to that really helps us out a lot. Thank you for subscribing, join the newsletter, YouTube is coming soon. I want to hear from you so thank you all so so much endless gratitude, so much love. I love you all so so much. Thank you for listening. Bye. Another great conversation. I sure hope you all enjoyed it too. We are incredibly grateful that you've joined us today and for spending time with us and I very much love connecting with you this remarkable woman on this platform. To be able to continue this marvellous act of co-creation please hit subscribe, leave a five star review and then if you would be so kind as to leave a few words for a review that would be super dope and please share us with a friend illuminated is all about connection and community. In the show notes you'll find all the links to work not only with my guests but also with me and to connect on social so please do that. If you mentioned the podcast you'll receive 25% off a private coaching session with me. I've studied with the check institute ZHealth I'm certified in Pilates and yoga and have worked with radical truth teller Cassie Underwood and Hipreces Harriet Hale. So I always love to learn and to be able to share what I learn with you is the greatest gift. Inless gratitude and all the love until next time, Jennifer.