One of the main things I praise my dog for isn’t sitting obediently, or doing a new trick, but when she shakes off stress.
She is an anxious weirdo ( a standard border collie 
), and needs help regulating her nervous system and being calm. All the stuff a normal dog might do for itself, she has had to be taught and have explicitly encouraged. So even though she has nailed her commando crawl and her ‘limp’ is getting convincing – it’s helping her help her own stress that is the priority for our praise.
When Lani shakes it off she is hitting the re-set button after a little stressful experience. It’s like her saying “that’s over, back to normal now” with a whole body- freeing up shake.
So what has my daft dog got to do with you and dealing with pain?
You need a physical/mental re-set mechanism too.
Don’t worry I’m not going to suggest public full body shaking.
But it is very easy to not move on and let go after a small stressor. And then those tensions accumulate into a tight body that you might hang onto all day. You may even struggle to let go properly when ‘relaxing’ at home.
All that tension can feed into winding up your pain.
A skill you can use to help is the mini let go; like a kind of ‘shaking it off’ .
Imagine an encounter with a difficult client. Or maybe a family member who winds you up.
Afterwards you will likely have:
A tight neck and shoulders
Shallow restricted breathing
Tensely drawn in arms
Maybe gripped hands or toes.
You will have the words that were just said going round your head. (Then, 5 minutes later you will have the absolute perfect riposte….)
We are all familiar with taking a deep breath to let go. That can be very effective.
You might also be used to interrupting repeating an argument in your head over and over.
What’s missing is addressing all the other stuff that can help you come out unscathed from a little stressful incident:
- relaxing your neck and shoulder muscles reliably with a practised self-cue
- Expansion and release of the whole body and limbs
- freeing breathing without special breaths.
Doing all these is the equivalent of Lani’s shake off.
A full stop to that stress response.
It doesn’t make stress go away, but it stops the physical effects of it hanging around and hurting you.
The key to this working really well is to practice the skills away from the stress at first. So they are familiar brain/body pathways that are easy to access when life is chucking difficult stuff at you.
This is one of the first big skills I teach in my Pain Freedom Pathway.
Do you need to learn how to shake it off? You can book a talk with me here.