When Pain Becomes a Signal: Change Your Response

My health, and by that, I mean my general body condition, is important to me. I want to feel fit and feel good about myself, the same as everybody does. And I’ve always done some exercise in various forms since I was a teenager.

But I did also used to smoke, until my son was born, and then I quit. But strangely, even when I smoked, I thought I was pretty healthy. I guess it’s human nature to justify doing the things we want to do, even when it is doing us harm.

Like everybody, I have some things that I would call health issues, but in the last ten years, they have definitely multiplied. I probably get headaches every week and sometimes on the same day each week. These are the headaches that medicine won’t cure, and I just have to live with the pain until I’m released from it.

Going to the restroom is another example. I definitely go to the restroom more than anyone I know. And I’d say at best what I can get from it is...

feeling uncomfortable because I need to go, being embarrassed because I need to go again, and worrying about whether I’ll have the opportunity to go again in the future. These things are a constant problem and affect my whole day because I have to navigate through some tricky situations while also trying to cope with these health issues. Another thing that has multiplied in the last ten years is the amount of pain I have.

And by that, I mean actual physical pain. I’m not talking about anything major like fractures or breaks, but bruises, cuts, and scrapes have become part of my weekly routine. It’s honestly ridiculous.

I feel like there’s a weekly quota of pain that I’m unintentionally trying to achieve every week. And it’s probably the only area of my life where I really can’t see any rhyme or reason to it. Instead of "no pain, no gain," it seems to be more like "no pain....no pain!" But however pointless it seems, I still can’t avoid it, even though I’m very careful.

There are other times, though, when the pain does feel more meaningful. And it makes me think I should stop doing what I’m doing or that I shouldn’t have done the thing that I just did. There are times when the pain is like a wake-up call to change my behavior.

I’ll give you an example. I was at home in the shower recently, and I was stressing about a problem at work, and then I dropped the showerhead on my foot. It was painful, nothing serious, but it really made me snap out of my unhealthy thoughts and think that maybe I should stop stressing and think about something else instead.

And that brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about: stress. This period of my life has without a doubt been the busiest and most stressful. And I’ve been under a lot of pressure in every area.

But after years of this, I do feel that it has had a positive effect, in that it has made me better at prioritizing what’s important and better at decision-making. The stress always comes in waves, and each time it comes, it pushes me to the limit or even beyond the limit of what I can endure, and then it fades away. All of my health issues are like this.

There’s an element of them taking me just past what I can bear, and then finally being released from it. But the two most important things that I notice about these issues are the repetition of them and the timing of them.

How to Wait Out Trouble Without Making It Worse

Of course, my relationships with my loved ones are different from those with the other people I know or meet. My loved ones "love me," and I behave differently with them because of that. I also spend the most time with them, so their roles in my life are "bigger." My relationships with my family have been and still are, to some extent, the area where I have a lot of my...let's call it "trouble." It's unavoidable, and each person gives me trouble differently.

It could be an argument with my wife about jobs around the house, or my kids fighting with each other and me having to get involved. And I used to just fall into these situations and only realize when I was in them that a time of trouble had started. But now I can recognize when it's starting, and I can get ready for it.

One of the most important things about these times of trouble, and how they make them different from other interactions I have, is that they all have one thing in common. They all make me feel horrible, like my whole life is off balance. When a loved one is making trouble for me, I've learned through trial and error that sometimes I need to act, and sometimes I don't.

But definitely, the worst thing I can do is to react. If I react, the situation goes into a downward spiral for me, and I end up having even more trouble. If it's one of those situations with my kids, I have sometimes found that my emotions are stronger than they should be in that situation.

I don't mean I have anger issues or anything like that, it's just that I can feel myself being disproportionately annoyed by the situation, and although I'm thinking, "Why am I reacting so strongly," I can't stop myself. But it's because I've reacted... and that was a mistake.

Sometimes I have to act, and I'll talk more about that in a second, but most of the time what I need to do is to not act at all. If it's a situation where, for example, my wife is complaining about me or another situation where I'm being criticized in some way, I just have to sit tight and wait for the trouble to finish. This includes putting aside what I'm feeling or what I want or what I want the other person to think about me.

Of course, I can't always do this, or I can hold out for a while, and then I just can't stop myself from reacting. Mistake. And so sometimes I do need to act, but it's not what you might think.

At those times, what I really need to do is to get busy doing something. But something completely unrelated. Something productive like cleaning up in the kitchen or helping one of my kids with something.

When I do this, after a certain amount of time, the trouble fades away. And I know it's gone because I can't feel that horrible feeling anymore.