Break the Chronic Pain Cycle with the Alexander Technique

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?”

The essence of the fish story is that the most glaring and significant truths are often the hardest to notice. It’s about awareness, and how what you’re aware of (or not) changes your whole reality.

Changing Your Pain Reality

So how does this relate to pain?

In the trenches of dealing with chronic pain, you’re probably aware of how tough it is to focus on the things that matter. Your internal pain chatter (which you may be hearing right now) has become your reality.

But if we shift our attention and start to notice the water - our entire reality can shift. 

Real freedom from pain happens once you can effortlessly switch your attention from the pain stimulus - and the conditioned ways you respond to and compound your pain - to pain relief strategies that help you move with freedom and ease again.

The Alexander Technique has been teaching how to do this for over a century. More than just another movement system or treatment, the Alexander Technique is another way of thinking and being. Frequently used by elite performers in acting, music and sports, most people use it to get out of pain.

It’s a clinically proven way of undoing harmful muscle patterning and it works fast, with many experiencing immediate relief.  

It is often the missing piece in restoring a healthy, functional body. Alexander Technique teachers have refined the precise instructions that best improve muscle tone, postural support and coordination so that you have the freedom to move without tension and bracing. I used it myself to get out of chronic pain.

Before you get to the precise postural and physical techniques to improve your movement, there is an essential stage of the Alexander Technique which is about getting to know yourself well in all your discomfort and pain.

Understanding Your Habitual Responses To Pain: Meet The Pain “Problem Solver”

Try the following exercise. And whilst you do this, remember there's no need to overly push yourself, but rather explore it within your own limits, observing what arises in your mind as you do this.

Start by imagining yourself engaged with a recent stressful situation in your work or life. When you’ve picked one, how about attempting a movement that triggers tension or pain?

For me, the two often come hand in hand. If I’m stressing to get some computer work done I’m usually also straining my body at the computer. You can put yourself into the same shape or posture you would be when doing this activity and see what you find.

What’s going on when you repeat this movement over and over whilst imagining that stressful situation?

Is any of this happening?

• Muscles tighten, pain starts, and breath becomes shallow.

• You distract yourself from the pain and stay focused on the task or screen.

• You keep distracting yourself until pain grabs your attention.

• You steer your attention away from the pain and back towards the task at hand, perhaps saying something reassuring to yourself about the pain.

• The pain gets worse so you distract yourself. You place your awareness anywhere but the pain, anywhere but your body, which now feels separate, pushed away. You’ve become disembodied.

• You’ve excluded the painful area from your awareness. For a while, at least.

• Then, you focus on it again. Awareness of everything else diminishes - the rest of your body, the outside world.

• You brace against the pain. Movement is more strained and tense. Pain increases.

• During concentration, you frown and tense your face.

• You’re becoming hypervigilant. Thought loops start in your head.

• Ow! Stop! Ow! Stop! Ow! When will this stop? Will it ever stop? Ow! Will it get worse? Is this more serious than I think? Ow!

Does any of this sound familiar?

Feeling down, anxious, or stressed about the pain too? Expect heightened pain, as neural pathways for pain intertwine with emotion centres, especially fear. Whether it's common worries like "Will this get worse?" or less frequent concerns about work and bills, these fears subtly shape your emotional state and pain experience.

Being in pain is exhausting. Throughout the day, your attention oscillates between distraction, thought loops, and over-focusing. When you’re busily engaged in something else, you feel less pain. Conversely, the more you focus on your pain, the worse it feels.

The more you then resist it, the more you want it to go away, the more you suffer.

How Pain Compounds Pain

These tense, rigid, stress-filled habitual responses to pain completely destroy our awareness of what it feels like to be truly comfortable and natural in our bodies. Worse - these responses compound any physical problem that may have triggered our initial pain.

As your body gets acclimatised to your scrunched, rigid or collapsed position the very movement that may actually ease your pain is sensed to be dangerous. Constantly braced to protect yourself your body no longer gets the information it needs to help you move with ease. 

By layering tension upon tension, you subject your muscles, joints, bones, and nerves to further unnecessary stress and strain.

Over time, this accumulation of tension can lead to further muscle imbalance, postural misalignment, and heightened discomfort.

Your habit of bracing against the pain may have become so ingrained that you don’t even notice it. Now it's as if the handbrake is engaged while you're still trying to drive the car forward.

This is why recognising your habitual responses to pain is the first step to changing your reality -  sensing the water again - and becoming pain-free.

Sensing the Water Again or Upgrading Your Awareness With the Alexander Technique 

At its heart, the Alexander Technique is the skill of recognising how the water is in your body and mind, and effortlessly shifting your awareness - changing your habitual responses - to have the freedom to move again.

You let go of a busy mind fritting between distraction, mind wandering, anxious thought loops, and over-focusing that cause the tightening and pain-creating responses. You become present.

This allows time, space, and ease for us to calm our nervous system, and become aware of, and prevent, unreliable sensory inputs and harmful or unwanted habit patterns. You can learn to interrupt your thinking and movement patterns consciously. This is key because persistently relying on familiar patterns prevents learning new ones. When you learn to stop doing the wrong thing with Alexander Technique, then the right thing can happen automatically. 

This may sound improbable, but it becomes self-evident once you experience it. By relinquishing the urge to impose familiar responses, you can allow the innate capabilities of your body to self-organise and respond with more ease and less pain.

Relax the Problem Solver - an Exercise in Non-doing

Try the following exercise by my late teacher Brita Forstrom. You will experience how “thinking into your body” affects muscle tone and can tap into this innate ability of the body to reorganise into less effort and more ease.

As you do it remember the directions are not something we ‘do’ with our muscles, but rather an act of attention only. They are preventative in nature, or ‘non-doing’, a way of ‘un-doing’ or letting go of the harmful tension patterns. The role of the conscious mind is to step back, let go, and trust your body’s own processes to get on with it.

1. As you are sitting reading this, rest one hand on your thigh.

2. Now focus your attention on the index finger and imagine that you are pointing the finger at something, without actually moving the finger.

3. You will notice that this finger now feels different from the other fingers. It may feel lighter or longer and will definitely feel more alive.

The difference you are feeling is a change in muscle tone. All you needed to do was 'think' about your finger and there was a change in muscle tone and experience. It was quite different from actually lifting the finger to point. You did not have to move any muscles. You were simply sending a message from your brain to the muscle fibres.

The aim is to think our directions creatively into the body, and in this way, we establish new pathways for the necessary nervous impulses to the muscles. What takes place is a redistribution of muscle activity and a change in overall muscle tone. By repeatedly formulating a wish for the right thing to happen (a pain-free movement), you can release any muscle tension that may prevent it from happening and then let the body’s own processes get on with it.

Moving Out of Attention Mode and Into Embodied Awareness 

The really important skill in life and the Alexander Technique is this effortless shift in your awareness. Learning to value the importance of this presence and cultivating a new way of engaging with your body is often the way to moving with more ease and freedom again. The alternative is never knowing how the water is, repeating mindless movements and reps of rehabilitation exercises (or insert your pain relief strategy that’s not working here) that continue to tell your body that movement is something to be scared of.  

If you’d like to know more about how to use mind-body approaches like the Alexander Technique to move without pain don’t hesitate to get in touch, or take a look at how my Pain Treatment Plans could help you.