We have seen that if we really understand the basic cause of our pain, we do something to reduce our anxiety and so lessen the pain. Further, if the cause of our anxiety lies in some conflict that we are aware of, then we can reduce our anxiety and pain by facing up to the problem realistically. However, as we now know there is another way to reduce our anxiety, and that is by learning how to be more relaxed. We do this by means of our relaxing mental exercises. While we are practising them we are more relaxed. Some of this relaxation stays with us afterward. Then with continued practice we find it pervading our everyday life. There is less anxiety in us to motivate functional pain, and we find that it gradually disappears.
Increasing Our Threshold of Pain-If we gently pinch our skin, we feel it but it does not hurt us. If we pinch it harder we come to the stage when it does hurt. This is our threshold of pain in these particular circumstances. We can see that our threshold of pain is quite a variable affair. If we get someone else to pinch us, and at the same time if we ourselves consciously relax, he is able to pinch much harder before we feel pain. In a similar way if he distracts our attention as he pinches us, we do not feel the pain of it so readily. But if our friend makes rather a show of what he is going to do, pain comes more readily because he has mobilized our anxiety, and this lowers our pain threshold.
Our relaxing mental exercises are used to increase our pain threshold in two ways. In the first place the reduction of our general level of anxiety makes us less sensitive to pain, and in the second place we can use our relaxing mental exercises in a positive way to condition ourselves against being disturbed by painful stimuli. It is important to remember that this approach is effective with pain which is due to either functional or organic causes.
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