Increase Pain Tolerance
Whether you’re at work or play, physical activity can sometimes result in pain. So what is pain? Yes, we all know it hurts but pain can best be described as a physical sensation that causes us to feel considerable discomfort. Often, pain can be so intense that we are forced to stop what we are doing and rest.
Athletes, in particular, often push past the pain. You may be a marathon runner who can finally see the finish line in the distance. Even though you’re feeling a whole lot of hurting, you pull all the reserves you have left of willpower and stamina. All of a sudden you’ve crossed the finish line. What’s more, you barely noticed the pain for that last stretch. But now that the race is over, everything hurts.
Somehow you managed to tolerate the pain long enough to finish the race, lay down the last of the tiles or got through the last round of a boxing match. It’s not that you didn’t feel the pain, you just found a way to increase your tolerance to pain. Let’s look at some ways to do just that.
Switch Your Focus
Many marathon runners feel pain in the last legs of a race. Their muscles are screaming to stop and they may have blisters the size of walnuts. Yet somehow, they still find a way to cross the finish line. Switch your focus to the goal ahead of you. Just a few more steps. A few more minutes and you’re done. Once you switch your focus on your goals, you’ll notice the painless. The intensity of the pain will be the same, but you’ve found a way to keep going through the pain.
Learn Breathing Techniques
Have you ever noticed that when you’re in pain, you’re almost holding your breath? You hold your breath and your whole body tenses up in response to the pain. Unfortunately, this will not make you feel the pain any less, and it may even intensity the sensations of pain. Take a deep breath and try to relax. Breathe through the pain. Once your body relaxes and you’re in control of your breathing and you’ll increase your tolerance to pain. Think of women in labor. Those breathing exercises really do help.
Visualize Yourself Pain-Free
To increase your tolerance to pain, visualize yourself pain-free. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Think of each inhalation as energy seeking the source of the pain and expelling it as you exhale. There are a number of different scenarios you can visualize to increase your pain tolerance, so find one that works for you.
Strengthen Your Body
The stronger you are physically, the more you’ll be able to endure pain. Regular workouts like HIIT (high-intensity interval training) or CrossFit are specifically designed for all over body conditioning and that includes improving your overall strength. Add to that, feeling pain during these workouts is inevitable, especially in the early stages so you will increase your pain tolerance. The stronger you get, the more pain you’ll be able to endure.
Push Through The Pain
The best way to learn to cope with pain, and increase your pain intolerance is to push through the pain. If you’re a chronic sufferer, you may still need to get things done at home or work. So you just do your best to ignore the pain and keep going. The same applies to athletes. They could be in pain after the first 5 miles, but they keep pushing for that extra mile. Learning to go on in spite of the pain is a way to increase pain tolerance. After a while you’ll be able to do many of these tasks without noticing the pain.
Keep It Simple
You don’t have to run 10 miles or mow the entire yard in one session and if you’re in pain, you probably don’t want to be doing much of anything. Keep things simple and break your activities and tasks into smaller, more bearable pieces. Once you get through one simple task, you’ll be motivated to tackles the next one. By setting yourself simple goals and achieving them, you are increasing your pain tolerance and feeling better about yourself for those achievements.
Meditation
Whether you meditate through yoga, practice deep breathing, or say a prayer to a higher power. Meditation can help you get through the worst of any pain you may be feeling. Mediation will help you become more aware of your body which will help you cope with pain and the deep breathing will help you relax more through the pain so you’ll won’t feel it at such a high intensity.
Go Out And Have Fun
Laughter is the best medicine and often when we’re with friends who make us laugh we forget all of our problems for a few hours and that incudes any illnesses or injuries we’re experiencing. Let’s not kid ourselves, the pain is still there, but when we are happy and laughing, we don’t seem to notice it as much. In fact, many people find they aren’t feeling any pain at all when they’re in a happy group. It could be because our focus is on something else or it could be that we’re more relaxed in a happy group. Whatever the reason, for those few hours our tolerance for pain is at an all-time high.
Adopt A Positive Attitude
The more negative we feel, the more we feel things like pain. If you keep telling yourself, you’re in pain and you can’t do anything, that’s what will happen. At the end of the day, you’ll have achieved very little and the pain will be worse. Boost your own self-confidence and tell yourself you can do that task, or go for that run. The hardest part is getting started. Once you overcome that hurdle, you’ll find you can tackle that, and many other problems. A positive attitude is often all it takes to move forward, despite feeling pain.
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