Dealing with Injuries Mentally – How to Deal with a Long-Term Injury

            Do you have an injury? Either something that came over time, like arthritis, tendonitis, degenerative disc disease, or something that was more traumatic, like a ligament tear, muscle tear, traumatic brain injury, hernia, or something similar? Yes, part of what determines your recovery is how you deal with the injury physically. How diligent are you with your rehabilitation. But the other part (arguably equally important) is how you go about dealing with injuries mentally.

            Since I’ve covered the physical side of things extensively in past articles, like the most common sports injuries, supplements for tendonitis, and arthritis, this article won’t cover that. Instead, we’ll really focus on dealing with injuries mentally.

            Here’s what you can expect to learn:

• The 5 different mental factors that contribute to how bad and how long an injury truly will last
• The 7 healthy attitudes that distinguish people who recover from injuries successfully, or keep their injuries forever
• How to break a mental block after injury
• How to deal with a long-term injury

…and more.

            If you need personalized help dealing with injuries mentally and physically, we have a special program called “Full Body Pain Relief.” If you’re interested in getting more details, just email me with the subject line “Full Body Pain Relief.”

5 Factors to Dealing with Injuries Mentally

            You know how some people and athletes can have an injury, and then diligently recover from it (people like Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, and just about every athlete in boxing or MMA come to mind), yet for other athletes, and non-athletes alike, an injury lingers for a long time, never heals, or takes too long to heal?

            What is it that separates these 2 groups of people mentally? Here are 5 factors:

Factor #1: Number of Opinions

            Want to know a critical element for an acute injury to cause chronic pain? Go to several different doctors and get several different opinions. If people in white lab coats can’t agree on a diagnosis, then most people think that there must be something really wrong with you, that even the pros can’t figure out.

            That’s scary, produces anxiety, and in some people, the underlying belief that “I’m broken beyond repair.” Ironically, in this case, fewer opinions are better. Find a practitioner you trust, whoever that may be (surgeon, chiropractor, osteopath, physiotherapist, etc.), and follow their recommendations, without consulting anyone else… at first. If after a reasonable period of time (what’s reasonable varies injury by injury, and person by person), you haven’t made the kind of progress that’s expected, go ahead and seek out other opinions. But when you’re just starting out, one opinion is enough.

Factor #2: Knowledge of the Injury

            One of my powerlifter friends has been having constant hip pain when she squats and does certain yoga movements. She ignored it for a bit, hoping it goes away, but it never did. Eventually, she went to a physiotherapist. When she came back from the physio, she told me “things just got real. I have hip impingement.”

            Meanwhile, I asked her “do you know what hip impingement is?” She said “no, but it sounds bad.” I explained to her that all that hip impingement is is a tendon is caught between the thigh bone and the hip. That happens simply because muscles are pulling on the hip and thigh bones with different forces. If you improve muscle imbalances, impingement goes away. After I explained it to her like that, she said “oh, that’s it? So, it’s not that serious?” Not at all. Sometimes, all it takes to deal with injuries mentally is to understand what those injuries are.

            Medical professionals like to throw around complicated terms that someone without a medical background doesn’t know. So if foreign terminology is used, of course it’s scary. It’s like someone talking to me about the latest smart phone, or the latest app. I have no clue.

            But when complicated medical terminology is explained to the injured person in laymen’s terms, from a mechanical perspective, it’s much less scary.

            In fact, I would go as far as saying that it would benefit the patient if the medical professional didn’t tell them their diagnosis in medical terms. So, if instead of saying “you have hip impingement” (which is a label), they said “your muscles are causing your tendon to get pinched between the hip and thigh bones”, it would be much more beneficial. This way, the focus is shifted from what you have, to what you’re doing.

There’s still a time and a place for labels and diagnosis, but I think those are much more useful for a professional to communicate with another professional. For instance, if a clinic has a chiropractor, physiotherapist, and massage therapist, it’s beneficial for them to talk about hip impingement with each other, but not with their patients.

If you know the mechanics of your injury, it becomes much less scary and mysterious.

Factor #3: Are You an Athlete?

            How bad an injury will be, how much it will hurt, and for how long it will linger will largely depend on whether you’re an athlete or not as well.

            If you’re a professional athlete (i.e. you get paid to do your sport), or expect to be, an injury is very scary. It could hurt your livelihood, and in some cases, may even be career-ending. Dealing with injuries mentally for a professional athlete is a higher stake than the next two categories.

            If you’re not a professional athlete, but a recreational one, and injury is certainly not fun, but it’s not hurting your livelihood. It’s hurting your hobby. And if you used to spend a lot of time at your hobby (whether it’s golf, tennis, etc.), an injury can also last longer.

            If you’re not an athlete, usually recovery from injuries is faster, because it doesn’t affect neither your hobbies, nor your livelihood.

Factor #4: How Your Parents Treated Your Injuries

            Imagine this: you’re 3 years old. You’re running on the playground, and you trip and fall. What’s the first thing you do? Before you even start crying, you look at your parents for their reaction.

            If at this age, your parents didn’t make a big fuss about it, they just dusted you off, and sent you back out to keep playing, there’s a better chance that as an adult, you’ll recover faster, and injuries won’t hurt as much.

            Compare that to the other scenario: you fall down, look at your parents, and there’s a look of horror on their face. They have concern in their voice, they stop the play session, and either take you home right away, or to the doctor. You will very quickly learn that something like this is a big deal. It should hurt, and therefore, it does hurt. If you had these kinds of parents, as an adult, injuries will be more painful, and longer lasting. So if you’re having a hard time dealing with your injuries mentally, blame your parents 😉

Factor #5: Your Attitudes

            Another big determining factor about the severity and duration of an injury is your attitudes. Let’s examine these one-by-one:

Attitude #1: I am Not My Injury

            How strongly do you identify with your injury? Has it become part of your identity? For instance, 2 people can have diabetes, but think about it differently. The first person may say “I’m a diabetic.” The second person can say “I have diabetes.” See the difference?

            How much is that injury part of your self image? The more ingrained it is into your self image, the longer that injury will last, because think about it – if you are your injury, recovering from an injury will require not just physical repair of the tissues – it will require changing your self image.

Attitude #2: This is Temporary

            If you believe that your injury is temporary, and will go away eventually, you’ll have a much higher probability of getting over it, compared to believing that it’s permanent. If you believe it’s permanent, then there’s no point in doing anything about it. Whereas if you believe that it’s temporary, you’ll be more diligent with your rehabilitation.

Attitude #3: I Am an Active Participant in My Rehabilitation

            A lot of clients come to us, and they complain “I have a great chiropractor/massage therapist/physiotherapist. They work on me, and my injury feels better for a few hours, or a day or two. But then it goes back to the way it used to be.”

            What’s the missing element? Active participation. When you go to a practitioner, you get work done on you. Either you have some of your joints adjusted, or you get lasered, you put on a hot pack/cold pack, you lie there while getting acupuncture, etc.

            You aren’t doing anything. Things are being done to you. Not to say that they aren’t beneficial. They most definitely are – but they’re incomplete. They’re only half the equation. The other half is you! Your active participation is required, via exercise. Maybe physical exercise, maybe mental exercise.

            That’s why a lot of clients who see us in conjunction with the other practitioners that they’re seeing see rapid progress. Like Carole, whose hip pain from arthritis decreased by 90% in the span of a few months. So much so that she almost completely stopped using her cane, and pain medications. Or Pat, who after years of having arthritis was able to prevent a hip replacement surgery with only a couple months of exercise.

            When you’re an active participant in your own recovery, you feel much more in control of your body, so not only do you hurt less, you also don’t hurt for as long.

Attitude #4: I Will Keep Looking for Solutions

            Another healthy attitude about injuries is a relentless one. You give one solution a fair try. If it works, you keep it going. If it doesn’t work, you keep looking for solutions.

            Once you stop looking for solutions, it’s a form of “giving up”, and “learning to live with the pain.” Of course, you never really learn to live with it. You just learn to stop complaining about it. The pain is still there.

            Fortunately, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If one type of therapy/treatment isn’t getting the job done, there are probably a dozen others that you can try.

Attitude #5: Focus on What You Can Do, Not on What You Can’t

            I know it hurts to move in a certain way. But can you move in a different way? For some folks, if one joint hurts, they stop exercising entirely. Big mistake. Let’s say it’s your left ankle. You still have your whole upper body, knees and hips that are fully functional. Use them, dammit!

            And even for joints that have some wear and tear on them, there are ways to modify exercises to relieve the pain for those joints. I wrote about that in my article on joint-friendly strength training.

            You don’t want to get into the rut of feeling sorry for yourself because of the things you can’t do. The list of the things that you CAN do is far longer than the list of things you can’t do. Focus on those.

Attitude #6: Look for Progress

            You have an injury, and you’re rehabbing it. Fine. Rather than paying attention to all the ways it hurts, and how you’re limited, shift your attention to all the ways that you’re making progress with that joint. Did you gain 5 degrees of pain-free range of motion? Great! Did you gain a bit more stability and strength? Fantastic. Dealing with injuries mentally is much easier when you feel like there’s progress being made.

            Ever notice how you get a new car, and you think it’s so unique? Then you start seeing every other car on the road that’s just like it. Same with injuries. Look for disability/pain, and you’re find it. The more you look for it, the more of it you’ll find. But the opposite is true as well. Look for signs of progress, and you’ll start making more progress.

Attitude #7: What Do You Attribute the Pain To?

            Do you think you’re in pain because of your age, or because of muscular imbalances? If you attribute it to age, that’s a recipe for chronic pain. After all, if age is responsible for your pain, there’s nothing you can do about that, so why even try? Whereas if you attribute the injury to muscular imbalances, well, you can correct those imbalances. If you take that view, you’ll be much more proactive about your recovery than if you attribute it to age. Dealing with injuries mentally is much healthier if you feel you can influence them.

            That’s why even though Carole was 73 at the time I wrote that article, she understood that yes, arthritis is due to wear and tear, and that wear and tear is caused by muscular imbalances. She hired one of our trainers to help her with those imbalances, and once they were corrected, her pain decreased.

How to Break a Mental Block After Injury

            The first step to breaking a mental block after an injury is making the unconscious conscious. Reading this article is a good first step, because in the sections leading up to this one, I talked about mental factors that affect injury recovery, as well as healthy attitudes to adopt in order to get over it faster. Sometimes we have these attitudes, but they’re largely “under the surface.” Only once you’ve acknowledged that you have these attitudes, can you start doing something about them.

            Let’s say you’ve properly gone through rehabilitation, and for all intents and purposes, your injury is now healed. But you’re still “babying” the joint that was previously injured. How do you stop that? By re-gaining confidence in your abilities. How do you regain confidence? By progressively exposing yourself to new stimuli that are just a small bit outside of your comfort zone. This is part of dealing with injuries mentally.

            For example, if you’re a golfer, and you suffered a lower back injury while golfing, you may not drive as hard after the injury. So let’s say that’s your case. What do you do? Practice driving with progressively more and more force, and more and more speed.

            If you find that after your injury, you’re driving at 70% force, push it a bit to what feels like 72%. Take the focus off your golf score, and put the focus on the power. Play as many games at 72% of your driving force as it takes for you to feel safe. Once you get there, try driving at 74%, and stick with this progression until you’ve reached 100%.

            Of course, getting past a mental block helps when you have “proxy markers.” What do I mean by that? Strength, endurance, and flexibility. You know that if your strength in the gym is going up, likely, you can drive the golf ball harder, so you don’t need to baby it as much.

            As I learned in the Z-Health course I took, another part of the reason that there’s a mental block after an injury is that the “map” of the body in the brain gets “blurry.” So you lose a bit of coordination. You don’t trust the movement to be as precise and crisp as before the injury. Dealing with injuries mentally means that you have to do exercises that restore coordination.

How to Deal with a Long-Term Injury

            First of all, you have to re-examine whether the injury is still “there”, or if it’s healed. What do I mean by that? For a lot of people, after an injury has healed, the pain is still there, even though there’s nothing mechanically wrong with the joint anymore.

            So if the injury is truly still there, the way to deal with it is to continue to rehabilitate it. I’ve written about that extensively in articles about joint inflammation, foam rolling, supplements for joint pain, and others.

            But if the injury is no longer there, and yet the pain is there, the approach would be different (David Butler and Lorimer Moseley talk about that in their excellent book, Explain Pain. Adriaan Louw writes about it in his book, Why Do I Hurt?). It’s about figuring out why the brain feels like pain is beneficial to you, and what to address in order to make the brain feel safe enough to stop the pain signal. This requires an assessment that focuses more on your neurology than on your mechanics.

            There you go! Now you have a very detailed way of dealing with injuries mentally.

            We have a comprehensive program designed to assess and improve both – the joints and the brain. It’s called “Full Body Pain Relief.” If you’re interested in getting more details, just email me with the subject line “Full Body Pain Relief.”