3 Things You Need to Enjoy Life, Even With Chronic Pain
/By Crystal Lindell
If you want to enjoy life again while also living with chronic pain, you need just three things.
1. An effective pain medication.
2. The ability to pace your activity level
3. Supportive loved ones
If you have all three of those things, it’s very possible to enjoy life while also enduring chronic pain. In fact, you could have a very happy life even with severe, debilitating pain every single day.
Unfortunately, of course, many chronic pain patients do not have all three of those things.
Even if they have access to opioids and other pain medications, they may not have the option to pace their activity levels due to things like work and parenting commitments. Or they may not have loved ones who show sympathy for what you’re going through and offer accommodations to make your life easier.
Sadly though, most doctors don’t recognize the importance of having all three things when they are treating chronic pain patients.
“Enjoying life” is usually not something doctors measure during treatments or appointments.
Personally, I don’t think I have ever had a medical doctor ask me how much I’m enjoying life. Rather, they ask you to rate your pain level, and then either ignore you or send you off to another random specialist.
It’s why they don’t value the importance of prescribing pain medications that actually work, and why they rarely offer education for loved ones about how to better support the people in their life who have chronic pain.
It’s also why doctors rarely explain the importance of pacing your activity levels.
While I have had medical doctors tell me to quit working, I’ve had only one psychologist explain to me that instead of fully quitting, I could just cut back on some activities and plan more rest days.
In other words, stop pushing myself to the point of exhaustion before taking time to rest.
I assume that many doctors don’t grasp the concept of pacing, in large part because of their medical training. Residency scheduling makes it so that they are often working 24-hour shifts, with little time to recover before the next one.
In other words, the exact opposite of pacing.
When you have chronic pain, you can’t live that way though. Of course, technically, you can live that way, but you won’t enjoy life if you do.
If you accept the fact that you need to rest your body from time-to-time, you can actually do more activities in the long run.
However, under a capitalist system that prizes work, sometimes that is just not possible, no matter how much you want to pace yourself. In fact, the same applies to the other two things you need to enjoy life: Sometimes doctors just won’t give you pain medication and sometimes loved ones just will not support you.
There is good news though.
Even if you don’t have all three of those things, you can still find some joy in a life with chronic pain, as long as you are very stubborn and tenacious.
You just have to find alternative pain medications, like kratom or cannabis. And insist on creating a life that allows for pacing, whether that means changing jobs or moving in with family to help with daily life tasks.
Then you have to educate your loved ones on how they can better accommodate you – and be prepared to pull back if they are mean or rude about it.
When I first developed chronic pain, I genuinely thought life was not worth living. That was more than a decade ago, and I’ve experienced countless joys since then: trips to Europe, meeting the love of my life, getting cats, and hugging my new niece.
Not to mention all the little joys, like fresh baked bread, cozy heated blankets on a cold winter night, and getting lost in a corn maze with my family.
I am very lucky to now have effective pain medication, a life that allows for pacing, and supportive loved ones. But I didn’t start that way. I rearranged my priorities to make it so. And it is possible that you can do the same.
You just have to stop trying to fight the pain, and instead learn to accept it. Then you can be free to live your life, while finding as many joys as you can along the way.
