In her new book, How to Be Your Own Physio, renowned physiotherapist Nell Mead brings over two decades of experience into an accessible, empowering guide. With a mission to equip individuals with the tools to relieve pain, enhance movement, and maintain a resilient body, Nell’s book offers a transformative approach to self-care in physical health.

If you’ve been following our series, you know that recovering from chronic pain isn’t just about managing symptoms—it’s about building the right mindset, improving posture, moving mindfully with more ease and freedom, and often integrating evidence-based complementary therapies.

According to the NICE guidelines on chronic pain, medications, and medical procedures can have a role in this, but they are not front-line treatments for chronic primary pain.

I wasn’t always someone who was open to complementary therapies. In fact, I was the kind of person who stubbornly stuck to traditional treatments, convinced they held the answers.

I went from one appointment to another, but no matter what I tried, the pain in my neck and back refused to shift. Then I discovered the Alexander Technique. For the first time, I wasn’t just focusing on…

Movement is fundamental to pain recovery. The much revered and latest NICE guidelines recognise physical activity as the most effective way to manage chronic pain.

Just in case you need more motivation, the science behind movement shows that it is critical for overall well-being, promoting everything from improved circulation to enhanced cognitive function. As Kelly Starrett notes in Deskbound, “What’s even more disturbing, and what virtually no one realises, is that inactivity is killing our brains—physically shrivelling them.” 

Information about good posture is too often reduced to making shapes with your body, like the military man's posture with shoulders back. Good posture quite simply allows movement with the least amount of strain and damage possible.

Instead of focusing on what good posture looks like, to help us get out of pain we shift the emphasis toward what good posture feels like, by thinking about a concept called "embodied ease."

The first pillar of recovering from pain is mindset. In the introduction to this series, we touched upon the concept of "Yellow Flags" and how they can affect recovery.

What yellow flags reveal is that attitude is critical when it comes to pain recovery. It isn’t everything, but without a healthy mindset, other interventions are less likely to succeed. The first step in shifting your mindset from defeat to empowerment is education.

If you google pain management or pain relief techniques the internet is awash with ideas: physiotherapy, osteopathy, CBD, injections, meditation - the list goes on, and it’s overwhelming. This blog series aims to be the opposite of that.

I know how overwhelming trying to get out of pain is and how easy it is to get frustrated and disheartened as I spent over a decade in this exact situation.

Pain can feel like a straightforward problem—fix the way you move, sit and stand, and fix the pain. I thought my own pain stemmed from poor posture, repetitive movements, and stress, all creating a structural issue that needed solving.

But pain isn't always that simple. Years into my struggle, a pain expert dropped a bombshell: focusing on biomechanics wasn’t the answer. Instead, he suggested, "Do what makes you feel safe and happy."

Neck pain can be completely debilitating. I know this firsthand after 12 years of neck pain, headaches and barely being able to move my head.

The common approaches to neck pain are strengthening, mobilisation and stretching. It took me years to figure out exactly what works best for me and others - and it wasn’t what you’d expect. Here's what I've learned through working with clients and addressing my own pain.

This is by far my favourite David Foster Wallace story:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and says “What the hell is water?”