Are you struggling with unexplained pain that just isn't responding to treatment?

Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

My friend Claire Baker, from Be Happy Healthy Empowered has just published an interesting article about pain, its causes and also about pain relief. She allowed me to post her article here so my readers can read it too. I think the article brings some hope to so many suffering people out there.

Claire's article follows.Are you struggling with unexplained pain that just isn't responding to treatment?


I had pain and fatigue for a long time. I took painkillers and drank gallons of caffeine so that I could push through but it just continued to get worse and eventually I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I struggled with it for 10 years, trying nutritional and physical treatments but nothing seemed to help. I might feel better for 2-3 days after a treatment but then the symptoms returned. Then I discovered a surprising reason behind my pain. In this article, I explain a little about what I discovered and how it helped me.

The Olympics have been on for the last couple of weeks and Usain Bolt won 3 gold medals for the third time. I watched him run the 200m. He is in the blocks and they are under starters orders.

* "On your Marks" - he gets into the blocks
* "Get Set" -he gets ready, the adrenaline is flowing, his muscles tighten, every part of his body is ready to spring into action when the gun fires

And I wonder how long he could hold that position if the "Go" never came. I'm sure that even Usain, the fastest athlete in the world, would struggle after even just a few minutes as his muscles tire and weaken.
Yet, many of us are held at Get Set for days, weeks or even months.

* A tight deadline at work
* Constant arguing with our partner / children
* Money worries

All of these things cause us to get stressed and go into the fight or flight reaction:

* Adrenaline is released,
* the blood leaves the organs of our body,
* the digestive system and immune system shut down,
* the blood enters the muscles causing them to tighten, to go into Get Set.

These reactions are perfect for short term stress such as running a race. Thousands of years ago, our stresses were the sabre tooth tiger coming towards you. Then, these reactions were perfect. You would run as fast as you could to escape the prowling tiger. Then you would rest, your heart beat would return to normal and the blood would leave the muscles, which could then relax, and go back into the organs as you were safe to continue digesting your dinner and fight the bacterial infection.

But our modern day stresses are different. You can't flee your job or fight your partner. So you hold it in. You stay at "Get Set". And over time:

* those tight muscles may cause structural imbalances and pain.
* You begin to have digestive problems because your food cannot be digested properly. You may get Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
* You get an infection that you are unable to fight off

So, the surprising cause of your pain could be that argument with your partner or your pressure at work.

The body has the ability to heal itself. But ongoing stress can prevent this too. So, reducing stress is an essential but often neglected part of the healing process.

When I look back to the year or so before I got ill, I had a lot of stress: a relationship breakup, working really hard to get my Masters degree, moving to a new town and starting a new job as a management consultant. I caught a virus that I never recovered from and then I started got odd pains and was really fatigue. So then, I started stressing about the symptoms themselves, which just completed the vicious cycle and started the downward spiral to fibromyalgia.

Was there any stress in the year or so before you got ill? Or is there any ongoing stress?
Here are a couple of short exercises to see if stress may still be affecting you. They can both be done with eyes closed or eyes open, although closing your eyes makes it easier to shut out distractions and take your attention.

1. Focus on your pain and quietly ask what is causing it and see if anything pops into your mind.
2. Scan your body and notice how you feel right now. Then think about a stressful event. It could be something ongoing or something from the past. Scan back through the 6 to 12 months before your pain started. As you think of an event that you found stressful, scan your body again and notice if you feel any changes in your body. It may be increased tension or pain, or you may feel the emotions that you felt at the time of the event.

If you noticed any unpleasant effects in your body as you did these exercises then this is an indication that the old stress is still affecting you now and could be contributing to pain, fatigue or other symptoms that you are feeling.

Fortunately, releasing the stress and emotions of these past events no longer requires you to talk about it for years in therapy. There are lots of new techniques in the field of energy psychology, which allow the negative impact that a stressful event still has on the body to be released in minutes - and without having to talk about it at all if you don't want to.

I found that using various energy psychology techniques to release stress and past emotional baggage enabled me to be in a calmer state which allowed the other treatments to be more effective and my pain and other symptoms reduced and my energy levels increased. The bonus was that I also felt a whole lot happier and able to break through anxiety and fears as I focused on what I actually wanted to do.

If you would like to learn more about how you can reduce stress to help your body heal, learn quick tips and techniques for managing pain and increasing energy and some of the science supporting these new approaches to health, sign up for my newsletter at

www.facebook.com/behappyhealthyempowered.


Claire Baker