Obviously, one of the biggest issues with having fibromyalgia is the pain one feels in the eleven different pressure points throughout the body.
But while the physical pain is the most noticeable thing one feels with fibromyalgia, and almost equally (if not equal) form of pain that fibromyalgia patients suffer from is the emotional side of things.
Depression, stress, anxiety, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, impeded cognitive thinking, and mood swings are all clear and true symptoms of fibromyalgia.
What’s unfortunately true is that the more emotional pain a fibromyalgia patient feels, the worse their physical pain will become. Therefore, if you can control your emotional or mental pain, your physical pain will go down as well.
Fibromyalgia may be a complex chronic disease, but the longer it goes untreated, the worse it will affect your life in performing daily functions. Taking care of the house and working at your job will all become much harder.
You can seek out professional treatment, but if you want to start controlling fibromyalgia on your own, controlling the emotional pain is the first step in controlling your fibromyalgia, not letting your fibromyalgia control you.
First, we’ll discuss the types of emotional pain a fibromyalgia patient can feel, then we’ll discuss one of the best ways to control it: slow and controlled breathing.
Depression vs. Anxiety
The two most prevalent forms of emotional pain a fibromyalgia patient will feel is depression and anxiety. Often times, the two can be experienced simultaneously.
Depression is extreme sadness that a patient feels throughout the day. Depression is not the same thing as feeling down in the dumps after a bad dad. Depression is where you feel significantly sad all day every day, regardless of whether you have a good day or bad day.
When feeling depressed, it’s not uncommon for a fibromyalgia patient to act badly by lashing out against others, crying, or feeling angry. Those are all normal symptoms.
Anxiety is feeling worry and fear in almost panicky manner, and over little things. Just like how a temporary feeling of sadness is not the same thing as depression, a brief feeling of your heart racing over heading to a job interview, per say, is not the same thing as chronic anxiety. Anxiety is you feel anxious and worried over nearly everything that happens in your day.
The Connection to Breathing
Depression and anxiety are the two most critical emotional pains a fibromyalgia patient can feel. But the more depressed or the more anxious a patient feels, the worse the physical pain will get.
Yes, there are medications you can take, and yes, you can take therapy to cope with the problem. But if you want to tackle this problem on your own before seeking out professional help, try this: slop and controlled breathing.
Slow breathing can help control a person’s emotional pain as found in a recent study by ‘Pain,’ a reputable medical journal.
Simple exercises such as meditating, sitting down and breathing slowly, or even practicing something like yoga can severely lessen the emotional pain a patient feels.
The study that ‘pain’ conducted took twenty-seven different women who displayed clear symptoms of fibromyalgia and reported suffering from both physical and emotional team.
The same study also took twenty five different women who were completely healthy and roughly of the same age as the twenty seven with fibromyalgia.
The researchers in the study then had all fifty two women practice slow and controlled breathing. All of the women, both those with and without fibromyalgia, reported feeling less emotional distress and subsequently, their pain lessened.
However, the women without fibromyalgia reported feeling less emotional distress and physical pain.
So while those without fibromyalgia reported better benefits than those with fibromyalgia, the fact is that everyone in the study reported having less emotional and physical suffering after controlling and slowing down their breathing.
This was the first time that a breathing situation was taken into account for a controlled, medical study. What’s more, is that there was no particular ‘breathing method’ used in the study.
The women were just told to control their breathing and to breath slowly, however they saw fit. In that regard, you can breathe slowly in whatever method you want to, and it should work.
Our knowledge of fibromyalgia in general is still very limited, and it’s very difficult for doctors to even diagnose those who have fibromyalgia because, well, fibromyalgia is difficult to diagnose.
This is because the symptoms of fibromyalgia often overlap with other chronic diseases and conditions.
But if the test subjects in the study all reported having less pain, than it doesn’t really matter if you have fibromyalgia, does it? Why spend all of the money and time (which can take over a year) to discover if you officially have fibromyalgia?
As long as you feel the pain and symptoms, or any pain and symptoms, why not try slow and relaxed breathing techniques to control your physical and emotional pain?
Stress
Besides the physical pain, depression, and anxiety, slow and relaxed breathing can also greatly help in controlling stress.
Slow and relaxed breathing can control stress because it can balance out the nervous system; the nervous system is what can cause a person to react to stress by increasing the person’s heart rate and blood pressure, and causing the person to sweat and perspire.
Think of the nervous system as the accelerator for feeling stress…only slow and relaxed breathing techniques can control the nervous system.
All in all, it’s important to recognize that you don’t just have physical pain, but emotional pain as well. As we have discussed, you can visit a professional for help, but simply employing slow and relaxed breathing exercises will go a long way to helping you control your stress, depression and anxiety on your own.
Further reading:
http://www.fibromyalgia-symptoms.org/breathe-slow.html
https://asunews.asu.edu/20100407_painstudy
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100120163704.htm
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