How Stress Makes Pain Worse
/By Crystal Lindell
One of the easiest ways to spot a true chronic pain veteran is that they will be eerily silent during the worst pain of their lives.
That’s because people who endure pain day-in and day-out quickly learn that the worst thing you can do during a pain flare is panic and scream.
In practice, those things only serve to increase your stress levels, which will also increase your pain. The best response to pain is to keep yourself as calm and as quiet as possible.
I did not know this in the beginning. Back when I first started having chronic pain a little over a decade ago, the pain itself would stress me out. I’d end up in a devastating cycle where the pain increased, which made my stress increase, which made my pain increase. Usually, the only way to break the cycle would be to go to the emergency room.
A new study, published in the journal PAIN, offers some data proving this phenomenon. Belgian scientists found that stress heightens acute pain caused by electrical stimulation to the skin, and increases sensitivity to pinpricks.
While pinpricks and electrical stimulation are a far cry from the type of pain most chronic pain sufferers endure, it is still interesting to see data proving what many patients have already figured out: Stress makes pain worse.
The study was conducted on healthy women, using two different experiments. To measure their pain response, participants were asked to rank their pain on a scale of 0-100.
To induce stress, researchers used the Mannheim Multicomponent Stress Test (MMST), a computer program that causes stress with difficult cognitive tests or disturbing noises and images.
In the first experiment, the researchers induced stress before they started administering electrical stimulation. They followed that up with pinpricks.
They found that participants ranked their pain after the initial pinpricks as being 10 points higher. But pain decreased back to the normal range as they kept administering the pinpricks.
In the second experiment, stress was induced 20 minutes after they started administering electrical stimulation. They found that pinprick hypersensitivity significantly increased after the stress was induced.
In other words, if someone is stressed before electrical stimulation, it can make that stimulation hurt more. But it doesn't impact whether or not they become more sensitive to pinpricks.
However, when someone becomes stressed after the electrical stimulation, the stress makes the sensitivity to pinpricks worse.
While I still hate when people suggest yoga as a treatment for my chronic pain, I will admit that learning to keep myself calm during a flare can go a long way. And research like this helps prove why serenity is so important for pain patients.
