Here's the steps we will cover and the progress you'll make.
1) Determine if this book is a valuable fit with your approach to pain management
- Pain management is hard because you have to figure it out for yourself
- The goal of pain management is to maintain it with little to no effort
- What’s in each chapter
- How this book can help, and who this approach is for
2) Why you feel stuck with pain management and how to fix it
- Pain management has poor, undefined goals
- Literature on pain science is helpful, but not conditional for recovery
- Pain management is full of fluff and vague case studies
- Treating chronic pain asks for a lot of your time and energy. Only sacrifice it if there is a clear benefit
3) Knowing how to spot neuroplastic pain is the first recovery step
- Neuroplastic pain is one of many unpleasant, mind-body experiences
- Your brain is rewiring neurons to create pain signals without your consent
- Know if your chronic pain can be treated by this approach
4) The science-backed steps we’ll follow
- Somatic tracking is the proven treatment for neuroplastic chronic pain
- Other unexpected learnings from pain studies
- You will master chronic pain treatment
- Simplify mastery into small quick wins
- Get in touch with your health practitioner first to make sure nothing has been overlooked
- Building a pain management team
5) Writing reduces the severity of neuroplastic symptoms
- Writing treats neuroplastic pain by expressing and resolving unchecked emotions
- What should I write about?
- Write for ten minutes in the morning, before your daily routine starts
- One messy handwritten paragraph is a quick win
- Writing is hard, how to not get stuck and give up
- Buy the right tools, and get away from your device
- Write to identify past events that initiated your pain
- Write to identify the things that currently sustain your pain
- Get tangible counter-evidence to demonstrate the plasticity of pain
6) Identify, and then decrease, what triggers your pain
- How the previous writing task is connected with this chapter
- A trigger starts an automatic process
- This chapter equips you to spot triggers
- Find things that make you aware of, and worry about, your pain
- Start by identifying external pain triggers, because they are easiest to spot
- Internal pain triggers can be challenging to find because they are caused by abstract brain activity
- Fear is a predominant emotion with chronic pain
- Replace negative anticipation with foresight
- Goodism throws gasoline on internal triggers
- Perfectionism, control, and high expectations
- Start validating or invalidating your big list of pain triggers
- Eliminate, redesign, or replace triggers, in that order.
- Get closure by focusing on one single trigger at a time
- Use somatic tracking on triggers that you can’t seem to budge
7) Somatic tracking is our high-impact method of treating neuroplastic pain
- The goal is to deactivate pain by decoupling your emotions from your bodily sensations
- Somatic tracking has massive benefits but is challenging to practice because it's counterintuitive
- Better pain adjectives are the tool for more effective tracking
- Complete your first somatic tracking by feeling your breath for five minutes
- Start performing basic somatic tracking with a body scan
- Advanced somatic tracking
- Decouple pain from emotions by reappraising it
- Your first few attempts are supposed to be a mess
- Practice regularly, not haphazardly
- Commit to doing somatic tracking when you experience a trigger
- Overcome common roadblocks for somatic tracking