Arguably the most influential book that I have read in regards to implementing ways to improve my physical health struggles is The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon. I cannot remember if this book was recommended to me or if I stumbled upon it randomly on Amazon (if you did indeed recommend it to me I am so sorry I am not giving you credit and am forever grateful for you helping me out!). The book is written to give guidance on how to implement “Pain Reprocessing Therapy”, which the author Alan Gordon created. He explains it in the book, but it is essentially a process to better connect the mind and body to give you the opportunity to open yourself up to reducing the severity of chronic pain.

In regards to the specific type of pain, the book discusses “Neuroplastic Pain”, which is described as the following, “Normal pain is caused by damage to the body. But pain that persists after an injury has healed, or pain that has no clear physical cause, is usually neuroplastic pain” (page 5-6). In other words, this is not immediate pain from a broken bone or a muscle strain, but rather pain that you have experienced that has no real explanation or “reason for being there”. This turns out to be the exact type of pain I believe I was (and still am) experiencing.

Before getting too far into the article and a discussion on neuroplastic pain I need to make clear that I am NOT telling you to ignore your pain. You should always seek medical advice when you are having issues. I am not a doctor and am not advising you in any way; I am simply telling you what worked for me and a potentially new way to look at chronic pain that you or someone you know may be experiencing. (With that being crystal clear let’s dive further into this topic).

Since my first medical event in November, I have struggled with a number of physical health issues, which have severely affected my mental health (for me the two are incredibly intertwined). I have had random twitching all over my body. I have had random calf aches and back aches and hip aches. And the most difficult to deal with has been random chest pain that at one point got so sharp and so intense that I had to go to the hospital for it. The problem for me was twofold. First, I had zero issues on any tests. I passed my cardiac stress test with flying colors. My cardiologist told me my heart was “prestigious” after he performed a catheterization. I wore a ZioPatch on three different occasions for a total of six weeks without any significant findings. Oh, and that time I went to the hospital for sharp pain? Nothing. Clean CT Scan. Clean bloodwork. However, although it appeared I had no actual physical issues with my heart, I was still having severe pains. They seemed to come and go without any real reason and with varying levels of severity. I could be watching a movie on the couch and my heart would feel like I was getting stabbed. Likewise I could run a 300 yd. shuttle or deadlift 500 lbs. and feel nothing. It didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t have any answers.

Which brings me to my second problem: I did not have any way of addressing the pain. I was basically trying to “tough it out”, and although my efforts were valiant, they were futile (the reason I would later find out after reading this book is that I was trying to fight against the pain instead of learning to co-exist with it).

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, “Well SOMETHING has to be causing this pain. Pain doesn’t just come out of nowhere. You have to do more testing for your heart”. I thought the exact same thing. In fact, I tried to push to get a Cardiac MRI as well. My purpose in writing this article is not to throw anyone under the bus or explain what I think happened to me, but the short version is for a time I BELIEVED WITH ALL MY HEART (pun intended) that there WAS something wrong with my heart. And every time I raised my heart rate or felt an odd beat I was creating more anxiety about my heart. Every time I lifted weights or ran I tried not to “push it too hard”. And when I was trying to “tough it out” I was fighting against it, which essentially told my body that “yes this pain is indeed dangerous and you should put up your best defenses”. In essence, you are right in your thinking: there was something going on with my heart; it just wasn’t my heart that was causing the issues. It was my brain.

So let’s discuss “neuroplastic pain”. How do you know that a “misfiring” in your brain is actually causing the pain you are experiencing? (In the book it’s described as inadvertently having your “pain switch” on at the wrong time). As is the case for me there are a number of possible clues:

1. No medical testing can explain what is happening/Lack of physical diagnosis – For me I passed all the heart testing that was thrown at me. Eventually you have to say enough is enough and realize it may be something else
2. There is no real trigger to the pain. It comes and goes without real rhyme or reason. As I mentioned I felt it sometimes when I lifted and sometimes I didn’t. It came on sometimes when I was laying on the couch and other times it didn’t.
3. The severity of the pain/symptoms is random/inconsistent. I can be randomly walking around during an off day in Detroit and having to go back to the hotel because my pain was a 9 out of 10. When this happened, I laid down and my chest hurt so bad. Later that day I went to dinner and my pain was 0 out of 10. The next day I lifted weights and had 2 out of 10. There was no pattern to it and no real explanation for why it came on so strongly some days and not others.
4. The pain doesn’t actually prevent you from doing things if you don’t allow it to. This was what I got right when I was “toughing it out”. I wasn’t letting the pain prevent me from doing what I wanted/needed to do (the issue was I was constantly fearing it and fighting against it instead of leaning into it and co-existing with it).
5. Other examples that come directly from the book (pages 163-168) are:
   1. Pain originated during time of stress and/or is triggered by stress (Me)
   1. Pain originated without injury (Me)
   1. A large number of symptoms (Me)
   1. Symptoms spread of move (Me)

 “I had surgery on my right arm five years ago. All the follow-up testing says it looks great, but for some reason I still feel pain”…”I hurt my neck at work once. The doctor can’t find anything wrong, but I just know something is there”…”I hurt my back squatting in high school and now every time I squat my back bothers me”.  If this sounds like someone you know (maybe it’s you) then you may be experiencing neuroplastic pain (again I am NOT telling you that you are, I’m simply trying to give you another potential outlook if you feel like you have exhausted all other resources/options).

This book described everything I was feeling with my chest pain. I was desperate for a solution and bought in to the author’s concept of “Pain Reprocessing Therapy”. The painful truth (another bad pun) is that with neuroplastic pain the pain is very real, it’s just not very dangerous. I had seen athletes struggle to return to their old selves after surgeries (even when the doctors said everything was fine) because of this type of pain (and honestly if you work in any sort of physical rehab or mental skills setting this is a book I would strongly recommend reading). In future articles I will explain the ways in which this book has helped me to manage my chest pain, but a couple important takeaways from this article would be:

-If you are experiencing pain first and foremost see a medical professional

-If you have “passed the tests” and there’s “nothing wrong”, but you keep having pain it may be neuroplastic pain being created falsely by your brain

-If it is neuroplastic pain you are experiencing the first step to healing is to understand that the pain is real AND it is not dangerous

Practical applications will be presented in future articles explaining how I continue to work to address my neurological pain!