Kind, natural method to relieve pains

By: Jeong Byoungmin-

Kind natural pain relief that we can find in our life.

Lots of people find medical care due to chronic pain. In the year 2021, 51.6 million people in the US visited medical care to relieve their chronic pain. If the pain occurring due to the conditions can be unbearable without any action to relieve the pain, many people choose to take medicine that relieves pain, since it is an easy, straightforward answer to relieving the pain. However, taking the medicine cannot be a permanent solution. As a person takes medicine, the person's body builds immunity towards that medicine, meaning that the medicine will not be as effective as it was before . Therefore, instead of impermanent medicine, other methods to control chronic pain are recommended to relieve pain. As a replacement for medicine, two of the methods are spotted to relieve chronic pain, which are changing emotion to reduce pain, and increasing sleep hours to reduce the pain.

First, changing emotion can be used as a method to relieve pain. According to a journal article, it stated that there is a physical and conceptual overlap between emotions and pain, and that they are clearly affected by each other. Therefore this can lead to the idea of manipulating the emotions to reduce pain of a person. Then another article has stated that psychological factors such as psychological distress is “recognized as a risk factor for the development of chronic pain”, or factors such as self-efficacy can “work against stressors that could impact the pain experience”. Thus it is important to stay with the positive attitude if a person is trying to reduce the pain that they are experiencing, instead of fearing and losing confidence about it, they need to have confidence in themselves and think positively in order to relieve the pain. When done so, it can work as a medication to reduce the pain in your body, and it can work permanently since the body cannot build resistance towards the emotions.

Another method to reduce pain without impermanent medication is increasing sleep hours to reduce the pain. According to an article that is written by Katie Whale, Health Psychologist and applied health researcher, states that experimental, cohort, and longitudinal studies have all demonstrated that restricted sleep is linked to greater pain”. This is due to the fact that “poor sleep interferes with certain pain centers of the brain and can change how a person perceives and reacts to discomfort” . When sleep deprivation is a problem that is amplifying pain, the pain can be reduced by simply improving sleep conditions by increasing hours of sleep. Reducing the pain by increasing the amount and quality of sleep is simply one method of removing a factor that creates chronic pain. When the person is in a situation where the person cannot get enough sleep, increasing the amount of sleep is a great way to reduce the pain.

Instead of medications that the person’s body can build resistance towards, there are other effective methods that can be used instead such as bringing more positive emotion and increasing the quality and quantity of the sleep. When there are other ways to reduce the pain that is applicable to numerous people, then it will make people’s fight against conditions much easier.

Association between pain and other emotional/social factors:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-64059-8