Episode 91: Your Relationship with Pain

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price, you might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome!

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to episode 91 of the 100% awesome podcast. I'm April Price, and I'm so grateful for every one of you out there listening, and enjoying, and sharing the podcast. The other day I had someone ask me, "Do you do any advertising for your podcast, you know?" And I said, "No, I don't." And they said, "Well, how do people know about it then?" And I was like, "I don't know?" Right? But really I do. It's because of you. People know about it because of you. It's because you are out there listening, and sharing it, and passing it along. And I am so grateful for your support, and your kindness. You are awesome! And I just want to ask you one other favor. You might have heard that I have a goal to get 100 reviews on the podcast by the time I get to 100 episodes, which is only nine weeks away now. So, I'd love it if you would leave a review, if you listen on Apple podcast, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says ratings, and reviews, and you click on a little purple link there that says "leave a review." And it would mean so much to me, and it will help even more people find the podcast. So, if something over the last 91 episodes has blessed your life, or helped you in some way, I would love it if you would leave a review. I know it takes effort, and so it means a lot if you take the time to click that review button, and share your thoughts about the podcast, okay?

And then, today I just have one quick thought that I want to share that doesn't necessarily relate to the podcast topic I have, but I have been thinking about it, and I wanted to share it with you here at the beginning. Okay, so this is the third week of January, I guess it will probably be the fourth by the time you hear this, and some of our New Year goals might have lost their shine. You might not feel quite as excited about your goals today, as you did when you started, right? And your brain might really be putting the full court press on you to quit, and give up at this point, okay? So, if that's you, and you can relate to that feeling, this little thought is for you. So, the other day I was listening to a podcast, and one of the coaches on there said a phrase that I think is so helpful. And she said, "New Year, same brain." I just thought, yes exactly, right? New Year, same brain. So a lot of times we get all excited by the idea that it's a new year, and we can do new things. And you hear stuff like New Year, new you, right? But we forget that we are taking the exact same brain into the new year, right? The calendar moved over, but it's the same brain running the show. And no matter what new year we are walking into, our brain is still up there thinking the way that it always has, right?

And that is not to say that your brain can't change, our brains have an amazing amount of plasticity, and they can be changed and they can be reprogrammed, right? In fact, they are constantly changing, but fundamentally, they will always notice the negative, right? That's the way they are programmed. And so, when we start a new year, that same programming is coming with us. They are programmed to notice the negative, their program to avoid pain, seek pleasure, and save energy. And that programming is coming with us into the new year. And as long as we live in a fallen world with human brains, that programming is going to be at work. And we live in a world that is 50% negative all the time, and our brain is going to fixate on that negative part. So, yes, "New Year, same brain," your brain isn't going to be magically different because we flip the calendar, and now it's only going to tell you encouraging things, and only notice your progress, and only tell you the reasons why you can have whatever you want.

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The factory setting is to notice why you can't do what you want, what's gone wrong, what should be different, why it won't work, where the danger is, right? Which doesn't mean you can't have what you want, right? It doesn't mean that you can't accomplish anything you want, but it also means that you are going to have to manage your brain through it. You are going to have to manage your brain to get what you want. That will never change no matter what year it is, right? And where we get into trouble is imagining that this year our brain is going to get on board, this year, our brain is going to help us go after our goals. This year, our brain is going to enjoy discomfort, and spending energy, and want what we want without putting up any resistance to it, okay? But the truth is, it's a new year, but it's our same brain.

Now, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to manage it to get what you want this year? That is always the question, okay? Stop waiting for the year when your brain is going to be different, that is not coming. New Year, same brain, now what? And if you want help thinking differently, but you don't know how, I can't think of any better way than coaching. Coaching is how I got everything I want in my life, and I learn to listen to the real me instead of my brain. That's what coaching taught me. I would love to coach you and, show you what's possible if you stop listening to your brain. So, you can sign up for a free coaching consultation on my website when you've decided enough is enough, right? I'm in charge now, brain, and I will help you do that.

All right, on to the main event. Okay, so as usual on today's episode, you going to get a dose of what I've been thinking about lately? So, sometimes people ask me if I ever get scared that I'm going to run out of things to say. And I'm like, I think that is completely impossible because I just keep living my life, and as I live my life, my brain is at work, and it is often working against me, or at least against the life that I want to create on purpose. And so, I feel like I'm always doing work on my own brain. And then, I want to come on here and talk to you about it in case it will help you as you work on yours, right? So, I'm still alive and so I still have something to say.

So, this week, in fact, I have been thinking a lot about pain. And I'm going to start today by talking a little bit about physical pain. But I want you to think about this in terms of any pain that you might be experiencing, okay? You might be dealing with physical pain, we all have moments of that, right? But also what can sometimes be even more prevalent, and more omnipresent in our lives is our emotional, and mental pain, okay? And I think the things that I'm going to share with you are I'm going to give you ways to think about pain a little bit differently. And I hope that they will make a difference in the way you experience any kind of pain in your life.

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So, to create a little context for these ideas today, I want to tell you about a couple of recent experiences that I have had with pain. In particular, I've had two recent experiences that have really made me think about pain in a new way. And one happened with physical pain, which are pain sensations that start in our body, and then our transmitted to inform our brain about it. That's what physical pain is. And the other one is with emotional pain. Now, emotional pain is is pain that starts in the brain with a thought. And then those emotions move as vibrations to be felt in the body, okay? So, physical pain is moving from the body, and then telling the brain about it. Emotional pain is the brain has a thought, and then it tells the body about the emotional pain. So, I'm going to talk about both of these kinds, and hopefully give you some insights, okay?

So, let's start with physical pain. So, over the holidays, my knees really started hurting, and they were swollen, and bruised, and inflamed, and creating lots of pain for me. And last week this pain started getting much worse. It started spreading and soon, like, the same thing was happening in my ankles, right? To the point that I couldn't really even walk, it hurt to walk from my bedroom to my office, right? And I was like hobbling along to try to get to work, and like, hobbling to the gym. And I took a couple of rest days, and it just didn't seem to get any better. I mean, sometimes it felt like if I could get moving, then it seemed to get a little better, right? But I was still pretty uncomfortable all week, and it just seemed to get worse, and worse. And to me, it seemed like there was no logical reason for this pain, and I hadn't hurt myself that I could remember, like, I didn't feel sick in any way. And I just had this pain, and it seemed like something had gone wrong in my body, there wasn't a good reason for it. And, you know, I was kind of upset that I was having this experience.

So, I'm hobbling around like an 80 year-old, and then, on Friday, it started spreading to my elbows, right? And then I could no longer straighten my elbows without pain. They just started hurting like crazy. And David, this whole time, was like, "Why don't you go to the doctor, right? This isn't normal." And I'm like, "Of course, it’s not normal! When is my body normal, right?"My body is never normal. There's always something wrong with it. And I just kept thinking like, there's always something wrong here. Finally, on Saturday, when I was like this crippled woman, right? I was like desperate, and I decided to go to the urgent care. Now this is probably a longer story than you need, but the long, and short of it was that the doctor there suspected that all of this pain was caused maybe by something called Valley Fever, which is like something that you get only in Phoenix, right? Which is like awesome. But it comes like by breathing in a fungus that's in the dirt in the desert here. So, she ordered some tests, and the results are still pending. But she started some antibiotics in case it was valley fever. She was trying to prevent pneumonia in my lungs, which is often like a secondary infection from Valley Fever.

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And this is the part that I want you to notice. Remarkably, when I woke up on Sunday, my elbows felt better, and my ankles were better, and the only thing that was really still bothering me was my knees, right? And I thought, my gosh, that is so weird, right? And here's why that is so weird, okay? Because technically, I hadn't actually been treated for valley fever yet, I'm still in the bloodwork diagnosis stage technically, like, I still actually don't know this is happening. But my brain, just knowing that there was a reason that my joints were hurting, and that it wasn't going to die, was enough to change the attention that I was putting on it, right? And that's what I want to talk to you about today, attention, right? The attention we give to things isn't ever neutral. Attention changes things, and the attention that I was giving to this thing that I thought in my body was not normal was changing my experience of it. It was making my brain really focus on it. And when we have pain in our body, of course, it's the body's way of telling the brain, "Hey, pay attention right here, there's something wrong. Put your attention here. Pay attention. This pain is dangerous and you need to be on the lookout for it."

And that's what my brain had done. It had gone to work putting its attention on the things that hurt, and the attention kind of amplified. It started searching for more places that hurt. It made me more aware of it. And it caused the pain to be a little bit louder, a little bit stronger, and kind of like transfer throughout my body. It's not that there wasn't pain there, and that my brain just made it up out of nowhere. There was pain. There was inflammation, right? But how you think about your pain makes a difference. How I think about that inflammation, actually impacts the physical experience I'm having. Once my brain realized that there was a reason for my pain, and it wasn't life-threatening, I could pay way less attention to it. It wasn't as dangerous, and that in turn made it not as big. My brain got a little bit like almost bored with it, right? So, I want you to notice that the pain that we expect, or that we accept, is there for a reason. Isn't nearly as bad, which means that how we think about our pain, or illness makes a tremendous difference in our overall experience of it.

Okay, now let me give you one other example of pain. This time I want to talk about emotional pain, and then I want to see if we can find the application for each of us. Okay, so recently in my business I have felt a lot of anxiety. Last night, as I was going to bed, there was again tons of anxiety. This morning as I got up, and drove to the gym, there it was again, tons of anxiety. And I started noticing more, and more just how much anxiety I'm having, and how maybe this isn't normal, right? Maybe it shouldn't be this way. My brain started arguing that I shouldn't have this much anxiety. I must be doing something wrong. Something's gone wrong here. And when my brain says this, that this anxiety is a problem, that it focuses on how much anxiety I'm having. It focuses on the pain, and that pain grows. My brain pays more attention to it, it notices how often I feel the twinges of anxiety. It notices how much better it would be if I didn't feel anxiety.

But when our brain gets really concerned, and puts its attention on it, and starts thinking it's dangerous, or that something's gone wrong, then it amplifies, and it grows my anxiety. How you think about your experience with pain, whatever kind of pain it is, changes your experience. Notice how different my experience is, if I just know like this is the part where I'm supposed to feel this way, just thinking I'm supposed to feel this way already changes things, okay? This is the part where I'm supposed to have joint pain. You have valley fever. So, this is the part where your knees are supposed to hurt. You have a business, and you're trying new things in it you've never done before, so this is the part where you're supposed to feel nervous about failure. You're supposed to feel anxious, right? Like the way we think about the sensations of pain, or the way we think about the negative emotions we're experiencing in our body make a difference. When I think it's supposed to be there, it's much less painful. Like pain is happening in our lives, I'm not saying it's not right, but I am saying that our brain has to interpret our pain.

It has to make sense of our pain, a story about our pain, our brain has to interpret what the pain means. And if you make it mean that nothing has gone wrong, and you're supposed to feel this way, it will change your experience of it. So, I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of that, right? Like, I want you to think about the pain that you have when you're working out, or you're lifting weights, right? That is real pain. But notice that because you expect it, or you understand it, your brain categorizes it differently than other kinds of pain. It's making an interpretation of that kind of pain, and that interpretation changes the experience of that pain, right? My son, and I started a new workout protocol on Monday, and I have never felt such intense pain while lifting weights. I told him, like, I am either going to throw up, or I'm going to start crying. But because I have categorized this kind of pain as not problematic, it actually changes my experience of it, right? Like we were laughing about it together, how much pain we were in, because we didn't have any resistance to the experience of that kind of pain. That category of pain, right? My brain had categorized gym pain differently, because of the way that it thinks about that kind of pain.

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It thinks that kind of pain is useful. What if it felt like the pain in my knees is useful, right? Like it just would change my experience of it, right? And so, that's why I just want to point out to you that the way you categorize your pain or in other words, the way you interpret your pain or think about your pain will give you a different relationship to your pain. So, when I was a teenager, my dad was a Dentist and he was just leaving his dental practice. And he took out my wisdom teeth right before he sold his practice. And I still remember, like being in the chair with him. And he told me, like, "Okay, just tell me if it hurts, right?" So, he starts working. I'm like, "Oh, yeah, it hurts." Right? And he said, "Oh, April, that's not pain. That's just pressure." And I was like, "Oh, okay." Right? Like I had catagorized it as pain, and he was like, "No, that's the wrong category." Right? This is just pressure, and that changed the experience, right? Like when I thought like, oh no, I shouldn't be feeling pain. I was alarmed by the sensations, right? But when he told me, like, the category was just pressure, and part of the process, then my brain settled down, and I had a different experience with it.

Which just reminded me, like, of course, of the birth process, right? Like when you can understand, and expect, and change the way you see those intense contractions that it's going to take to open the birth canal. And you see that as like the natural response that's supposed to be happening, then you have a completely different experience with it, than if you think like, oh, my gosh, something's gone wrong, right? Or if you think, like, you can't handle it, or you can't control it, or it's going to last forever, like the way you think about your experience with the pain actually ends up changing your entire experience with it, okay? Which is not to say it's not painful, it's just to say that there is a huge difference in resisting it, and thinking it shouldn't be there, too. On the other hand, understanding its purpose, and its rightness in being there, your own story about your pain, whether or not you have resistance to it, can actually increase both your mental, and physical pain.

Okay, so I want to give you the example to think about depression for a minute, okay? There is depression, and all the pain that comes from that physical experience. But notice that when we think we shouldn't be depressed, or our life would be better without depression, or something has gone seriously wrong with us that we are having this kind of experience, then we increase both the mental, and physical pain we are experiencing in depression. We are adding the attention of our brain, and these thoughts tell our brain this experience is dangerous, we shouldn't be having it. And then, we're wary, and we're on the lookout for every increased symptoms, and it actually becomes bigger the more we tell ourselves it shouldn't be there, or that something has gone wrong, right? Nothing has gone wrong. Your body, and your brain are doing exactly what it needs to do when you have that hormone imbalance. This is the part where our energy is low. This is the part where negative emotions are ever present, because we are having depression, right? Just like this is the part where knees hurt because we have Valley Fever, and we can get treatment, and maybe it will help.

But thinking that it shouldn't be happening only increases our resistance to it, and brings our attention to how dangerous this is, which increases the amount of our suffering. When we resist our pain, any pain, we make our brains hypersensitive to it, and they go on high alert looking for this danger. Now, I just want to like really clearly apply this to your emotional pain, and more specifically to our entire experience of negative emotion when we think we shouldn't be sad, or worried, or overwhelmed, or confused, or anxious, or angry, or whatever negative emotion we are feeling when we think we shouldn't be that thing. Our brain makes it a big problem, right? It says we shouldn't be feeling this pain. We're doing it wrong. There's something wrong. And it would be better if this was different. And this changes our experience of our negative emotion, puts our brain on high alert for it, and makes it more painful. This is why one of the very first things that I offer my clients, and then I want to offer you is the thought that, "I don't have to feel better." There is nothing wrong with feeling that there is nothing wrong with negative emotion or having any of these experiences that feel that this is what it means to be human.

And we can just feel bad. We can drop into our bodies, and notice what it feels like physically when our brain thinks a thought that produces a negative emotion, right? It's the thinking that we need to solve for it. And there's a problem here that changes our experience with it. Just like thinking I need to solve for my joint pain, changed my experience with it, right? When I know I don't need to change, and I don't need to solve for it, and there's a good reason for it, then my attention on it fades, and my pain recedes. And the same goes for your negative emotion when I know that I don't need to change it, and that there's a good reason for it. I just had a thought, right? And it's totally fine that I had that thought, then my attention can fade and my pain will recede. I'm not saying that all your pain is made up in your head, I'm saying that what we put our attention on grows. And when I put my attention on how I shouldn't be feeling, my brain identifies that emotion as dangerous, and it notices it more, and more.

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Okay, so step one is just to feel bad, right? It's awesome. Be willing to feel bad, and stop telling yourself you shouldn't. When we are okay, feeling bad it recategorize is the pain, right? It recategorizes our negative emotion as not dangerous as not a problem. Just like the pain in the gym is not a problem. We see pain in the gym as part of the process, like a necessary part of the process, not a problem. What if we saw our negative emotion, anxiety, overwhelmed grief, as part of the process, as part of the necessary process of human life? And instead of as a problem, when we feel bad thoughts like there's something wrong with me, or something's gone wrong in my life, or it would be better if it wasn't this way, these thoughts are only going to add to our pain. They're going to put the brain's attention on how big the problem really is and that is going to increase our pain levels. I think it shouldn't be this way is like the number one thought, increasing our pain and making our experience with pain harder, right? Whether I'm experiencing anxiety in my business, or pain in my knees, "it shouldn't be this way," only puts my brain in the position that this thing is dangerous. And that makes me more aware of it in a way that increases the pain.

And then step number two, as Eckhart Tolle says, accept it as if you had chosen it, accepting whatever pain we are in, as if we had chosen it, will change our experience of it, right? Think about how acceptance changes any kind of pain. It allows us to recategorize it when we accept it as part of the process, right? Think about birth, the birth process. Think about how what a difference acceptance would make, for depression, or loneliness, or loss, or grief, right? How much pain do we add, when we tell ourselves we shouldn't feel grief? We're doing it wrong, or we should be able to move on, right? The more you can open to the exact experience you're having as if you had chosen it, the better you are going to be able to feel it will actually decrease your pain.

And then finally, step three. Notice how you pay attention to things, and how attention changes things. Notice, how you talk about your pain, if you talk about your negative emotion, like your broken, right? Then your brain is going to be on the lookout for this dangerous situation out there. I think I've told you before about Mel Urie, right? Who is the only woman to ever finish the the Uberman, which is like the world's hardest endurance race. And I remember when she talked about it, she said that like no one on her team was allowed to ask her about her pain, or suggest that she looked tired, or she should stop, and rest, like they were just not allowed to bring any attention to it. And she's not the only one. Like I hear interviews all the time where athletes have the thought to, like, not give voice to the pain, not put our attention there, because as soon as we put our attention there, our brain goes on a mission to notice it, right? Beware of it and that only enables it to grow.

Like just think about it for a minute. If Mel Urie is always solving for her pain, she is not going to finish this race, right? You can't do that race without pain. Pain, in fact, is required, and any athlete knows that pain is part of their goal. And so, they haven't categorized it as a reason to stop, and that can be true of so many things that we want to do in our lives, right? You can't do all the brave, important things you want to do in your life if you're trying to solve for pain along the way, or if pain itself is the problem, right? So, many times when it comes to the discomfort of growth, our brain has categorized that pain as a reason to stop. So, when I say, like, don't give voice to your pain, I don't mean pretend that it's not there. I mean that it doesn't matter that it's there. It's not a problem that it's there. Of course, it's there. I'm just saying it's irrelevant for anything outside of your comfort zone. It is going to be there, and it doesn't need a voice because we already know it's there. It's part of the deal. It's part of any goal or dream, right? And it's actually a vital part of any Earth-life experience. 50% of anything we do, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, anything is going to have 50% negative emotion, or what I'm calling pain here associated with it.

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And so, not giving a voice to it is the difference between knowing it's supposed to be there so that your brain isn't alarmed by it, and worrying that it shouldn't be there, which your brain uses to make the pain worse. It's kind of like if you think about getting up early every day I get up, my brain is like, this hurts, we shouldn't be up, right? And I just acknowledge that, of course it's right. That's irrelevant. We're moving forward. We're going to the gym. Now, if I sit there, and think like I have to solve for this, of course, my brain is going to talk me into sleeping. Another really good example is just like yesterday, it rained in Phoenix, okay? And when it rains in Phoenix, like the entire town is like what is happening, right? And there's like news articles about you got to be careful out there, the roads are really slick, right? And I was thinking about how, OK, there are probably no news stories in the Pacific Northwest when it rains, right? Nobody's out there saying, like, don't forget, it's slick out there, right? Like in the Pacific Northwest, they don't give rain a voice, right? Because it's irrelevant, they don't need to, it's just part of the experience of living there.

And so, I want you to think about how different I'm going to experience, like the anxiety, for example, in my business, if I see it like that, like part of the experience so that it doesn't even have to be acknowledged. It goes from something that's gone wrong, to nothing has gone wrong. This is just part of it. And that will change your relationship with any pain that you're experiencing in your life. So, let's say you're experiencing anxiety in your schoolwork, or stress in your business, or like loneliness in your relationship. I am not saying to pretend you aren't having that experience. I am not saying to pretend that you're everything's fine, and you're not having that emotion, right? Not giving a voice to it means being okay that it's there feeling it, experiencing it, and then not needing to change it, or giving voice to it means like we got to do something about this.

But what we want to get to is like the part where we're willing to feel it, and experience it, and not need to solve for it. It means, of course, there is pain when you swim from Catalina to California. Of course, there's fear when you go to do something new in your business. But that is okay, that it's there. It's supposed to be there, and you can open up the truth of that experience, but you don't need to solve for it, or have it be any different. Don't give it a voice in the sense that it totally gets to be there. It's part of our Earth-life experience, but it is never my focus.

So, as I have thought about pain this week, I listen to a podcast episode of invisibility that NPR produces, and they were talking about how there was a switch in medicine a few decades ago, right? That used to be just like acceptable, like in the 50s. That pain was just a part of life, and medicine wasn't trying to solve for that, right? It wasn't a thing that needed to be solved in the world, right? And when that changed, and they kind of like paid more attention to pain, and they created a pain scale, right? Like when you go to the doctor, they're like on a scale from 1 to 10, what's your pain, right? And as soon as they started bringing attention to pain as something to solve, or that like pain is a problem, then the pain problem started to get bigger. And I think it's the same with emotional pain, when we think we shouldn't have it, that we should be happy all the time, that we should feel better, that we shouldn't have so much negative emotion, then negative emotion suddenly becomes something to solve for.

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And it gets bigger because the brain then goes on high alert looking for it. But when you know that pain is just part of your life, both emotional, and physical, and that nothing has gone wrong because you are experiencing it, like even the pain you create with your own thinking, then the brain can kind of just get bored with pain. It stops paying attention to it as this very dangerous thing. Pain goes from being like that tiger in the bush that your brain has to keep an eye on and watch out for and like like monitor.

And it just becomes instead the bush part of the scenery, just like part of like what is in the world. And it's no longer dangerous. Attention isn't neutral. And when you tell your brain that pain isn't a problem, it can stop paying attention to it and that will change your relationship with it. Remember, it's not that you shouldn't have pain. It's that thinking you shouldn't have pain is what is adding and increasing your pain.
Pain isn't just in your head, but your experience of it is highly impacted by the way you think about it.
And that, my friends, is one hundred percent awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your earth life experience, sign up for a free coaching session at apple pies, coaching dotcom. This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever. As your coach, I'll show you that believing your life is one hundred percent awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay. And that, my friends, is one hundred percent awesome.