How To Make Painful Postural Decisions

A few days I wrote about your biggest problem is the often not problem itself, but the fact that you keep thinking about your problem. Check the blog to remind you.
https://atsuccess.com/blog/2020/12/how-avoid-becoming-pain-your-self.html

Your constant referential refrain empowers your difficulty to grow beyond itself. 

This is especially true of pain - those niggling ones we have all experienced at some time in the knee, fingers, back and neck. The pains that get activated when you walk, or sit down, or spend too long at the computer.

And when you think about them!

Sarah Compton is an Alexscovery (aka Alexander Technique) teacher in the UK who specialises in helping people out of chronic pain. She knows because she’s battled it herself.

After reading my Daily, she wanted to flesh it out, and she did!

Here’s the brain science from Sarah that backs up my assertions… 

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Also, in this circle is the actual neurology of pain, where the unconscious brain triggers the experience of pain. In repeating a movement in a painful way, the nerves and brain set up the expectation of pain, creating a hypersensitive and real neural pathway associated with the given act. Thus even thinking of the movement can trigger the pain experience, without any muscular activity at all. (Bit like phantom limb pain, but you are still intact.)

It is my belief, that in bringing Alexander into the problematic movement, we are using a different coordination pattern and therefore a slightly different neurolo-muscular pathway, avoiding the precise oversensitised one that is on red alert for pain. That is of course in addition to the obvious reduced strain and pressure on the area in question. Win, win, win.

For years I had had a knee problem walking down mountains. Yes, my poor coordination and also physiology had a lot to do with it. After I found out about the neural pathway stuff, I was delighted to observe, after one descent, no pain! Even more fun, I got a big twinge of exact same said pain sitting in the car driving home, looking up at the mountain I’d been on. Neural pain pathway well established, countered using Alexander during the activity.

Alexander is so wonderful, and it is well worth understanding much more about our neurology as this deepens our Alexander experience.

Practising inhibition allows the neural pathways to quieten before activity, enabling a different pathway than the habitual painful one to be chosen, so the pain nerves aren’t activated.

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Put that in your pipe and smoke it!