Is Pain a Bad Habit?

This is one of those speculation posts.   It has nothing rooted in research or knowledge based on trolling the Internet for information.   It’s just me thinking to myself.   We pick up all sorts of bad habits during our lives.   For instance, drinking too much caffeine or chewing on your fingernails.  Some things are learned behaviors too like not being able to jump into a pool because you don’t like the shock of the cold water.

Then there are behaviors that go over the line and become phobias.   For instance, say I didn’t like snakes.   I don’t mind snakes, they’re beautiful creatures, just so long as we give each other a wide berth.   But some people hate snakes.   That hate can turn into abject fear and even become a phobia.   It can happen that way without even a bad experience to back it up, just the reiteration again and again in your mind that snakes can cause you to die and should be feared and fled from, even when they’re dead three days on the road.

I’m going to use my best friend here as an example, mostly because she doesn’t read this blog but also because she’s an understanding sort and would only whack me once or twice if she knew I was writing about her.   She hates snakes.   Her fear isn’t rational and she knows it.  When we’re out running in the park if I ever see a snake I gently run her out of the way and then twenty or thirty yards later I tell her.   And then I laugh, because she breaks into a high sprint and sometimes screams.   Which is funny, and even she admits it, especially when it was a ten-inch baby non-venomous snake. The point is her brain has made something small into something big to her.

So what about pain?   Is pain something that rolls around in our heads, something to be feared, something that the more we fear, the worse it becomes?   Can pain be an intentional bad habit?   I really don’t know,  but I do know the more I experience pain the more I fear it.

And by that I don’t mean all pain.   The pain of sore muscles from a good workout is always a nice sort of pain.   I might not be able to walk straight or lift my arms above my head or walk down stairs without holding on to the rail, but it’s a positive pain.    Other pains like tooth ache pain can be resolved at the dentist.   It might not be an inexpensive resolution, but the pain can be cured.

Then there is the pain that just won’t go away.  A bad knee, torn shoulder, arthritis, nerve damage, etc.  Pain that can’t be controlled or is persistent.   Do we make that pain more amplified in our minds because we can’t get away from it?

I don’t know.   I have no medical knowledge or statistical data, but I see people coping with pain every day—many decades older than I am—and they’re not complaining.   It makes me wonder about how different people cope with pain and if I’m the equivalent in handling pain as my best friend’s is in dealing with snakes.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Vegetable Update:  My son told my husband yesterday, “dad, we haven’t had zucchini in a while.”  Then this morning my daughter said to dad as he was getting up, “guess what we haven’t had for a long time?  Broccoli!”   You can bet we went to the store to get their requests for dinner tonight.

Ten Miles:  We ran a bit faster today.   Strange run as we didn’t start until after 4:00PM.   I’m oddly tired but I think it’s more the time of day than the distance we ran.