RULE TO BREAK

“You can’t be cheerful if you’re in pain”

Pain grinds you down, makes you grumpy, frustrates you, limits you, and makes you feel hard done by. It’s impossible to enjoy life.

Or is it? There obviously must be a level of pain where that’s so, but for most people it’s perfectly possible to be cheerful regardless. Whether you have a headache, a stinking cold, arthritis, toothache, a broken wrist or a slipped disc, you don’t have to be miserable as well.

I had a very enlightening conversation with a friend who has chronic arthritis. I asked her one day, ‘Does it hurt all the time?’ And she replied, ‘Oh, it doesn’t hurt! It just aches, that’s all’. Now, most people would consider constant aching to be pain. But she has chosen to redefine it so that she doesn’t think of herself as being in pain. Much impressed, I’ve adopted this approach every time I’ve been in pain since. And she’s quite right. If you tell yourself it hurts, it’s far more painful than if you tell yourself it doesn’t.

You must have noticed that if you’re feeling fed up and tired, crammed on a commuter train at the end of a long day, and someone treads heavily on your foot, you can find it really painful. But if you’re busy playing football, or enjoying a romantic walk in the countryside, or in the middle of an uplifting open-air concert, you’d barely notice the self-same injury. Which just goes to show that pain is largely in the mind. If you allow it to take over and dictate your mood, it will drag you down. So don’t let it.

It just isn’t fair on you, or on everyone around you, to be grumpy and downbeat just because some bit of you hurts. When you’re young it may seem like bad luck but, trust me, once you get older it’s pretty much the norm to have some part of your body letting you down and failing to co-operate. If that’s all it takes to spoil your fun, life’s going to go downhill fast once you pass about 40 or 50.

The time to practise getting the better of pain is, ideally, when you’re young. For most younger people, most of the time, it’s an irregular occurrence. Nothing to moan about compared with some of the people you know. So get into the habit of telling yourself that your headache isn’t that bad, or your tooth only aches a bit, or your bad knee isn’t enough to stop you walking, or the eczema is itchy but it doesn’t really hurt. Accept that it is what it is, and then just get on with your life.

If you focus deeply on the pain, you can try to analyze it to the point where you can ‘zen’ it, and it becomes impossible to explain to yourself why it ‘hurts’. It’s just a sensation you’re experiencing. Very interesting. And now let’s get back to what you were doing and pay it no further mind.