It's like, not okay Lyrics

Trauma sensitizes the brain to pain

The cooccurrence between trauma and chronic pain is something like 50 per cent up to 80 per cent

So if you've had trauma your brain is extra sensitive to pain messages

Because pain messages are your bodies danger system

So if you've been traumatized your brain is like oh is something bad happening and how do I protect this human

If we're biologically wired to believe that pain means danger it's very hard to undo that

What's happening now is that your brain is scanning your environment

Looking for anything that might be dangerous

Small bits of sensory information create in your brain this amplified output

Because God bless your brain it is trying to protect you and that's what it thinks its doing by creating pain

Pain is your bodies warning system

But like every system in the human body the pain system can fail

So when we have chronic pain which we know is its own disease process

What is happening oftentimes is there's this amplification process happening

And small bits of sensory input are being interpreted as dangerous when in fact there's not danger

People with chronic pain frequently understandably and normally develop anxiety and depression secondary to their chronic pain because as we all know chronic pain is a thief

It steals your ability to work sometimes it steals your ability to play

It steals your ability to engage in your life in the way that your want to

And because of that a lot of people normally and naturally with chronic pain develop anxiety and depression

Chronic pain is stigmatized in part because people think there's a lot of mental illness around chronic pain

As someone who treats chronic pain everyday

I watch my patients get out of bed and get back to life as their pain goes down and they're able to function more their anxiety and depression magically f'ing goes away

What I want to make sure everyone knows if they have chronic pain

Anxiety and depression are what we call normal responses to an abnormal situation

This is not to say that you cant have some sort of mental illness prior to developing chronic pain and I am clearly not saying mental illness is not real like I'm a psychologist

But I do want to make sure to say that stigmatizing people with chronic pain and saying that everyone who has chronic pain is mentally ill is just like not okay

It's like not okay