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Rethink Your Pain: What's in Your Pain Backpack?

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Experts know that physical, psychological, and social factors all play into whether or not you hurt at any given moment. This makes persistent pain very complex. So we like to think about this concept in terms of an analogy.

Let’s say that every factor that contributes to your pain goes in a backpack. For instance, your pain contributors may be a previous injury, inactivity, and stress at work or home. All of those factors would go inside your backpack. Everyone carries unique factors in their backpacks, some of which may contribute to your pain more so than others.

When your backpack becomes so full that you can’t zip it shut, your body sends a warning in the form of pain.

The good news is that there is always something you can do about this.

Hinge Health can help you address the pain contributors that are within your control with approaches that include movement, education, social support, and other lifestyle modifications.

Ready to get started? Here are a few tips:

  • Develop a mindset for change. Change takes time. It requires practice and patience.

  • Use movement as your medicine. Increasing your movement by even one minute can help you reduce your pain contributors.

  • Get ready to build skills through action! Small actions allow you to develop the skills you need for a lifetime of empowerment.

You might have factors in your backpack that will always be there. That’s okay. Let’s not let those contributors keep you from reducing your pain and living the life you want to live.

Watch our Pain Backpack video on YouTube.

Key Takeaways

  1. Pain is influenced by many different factors, some of which go beyond physical contributors and include stress, sleep, diet, and more.

  2. You can think of your unique pain contributors as factors that go inside of a backpack. When your backpack becomes too full to zip, you experience pain.

  3. There may be factors in your backpack that will always be there, but there are a lot of factors that you take control of through your habits and behaviors.