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CHANGE YOUR MINDSET: How this can help you heal from physical pain

Being able to heal yourself is such an essential part of modern-day living. However, I’m not just talking about healing from emotional and situational traumas you may encounter throughout your life, but also from the physical pains and conditions you might face.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “change your mindset, change your life,” or words to that effect. While this is a great approach when it comes to dealing with things like habits, your outlook on life and your ability to make positive changes, managing your mindset is also a powerful tool when it comes to healing physically.

What do we mean by “heal?”


Let’s say, for example, you’re struggling with a medical condition. It can be any medical condition, but for the sake of this article, let’s say you have a bad knee. You’ve tried taking painkillers and going through treatments, and while this has sometimes been helpful, the problem continues to persist.

Obviously, this is a condition you’re going to want to heal and overcome. However, your mindset will play a massive part in the healing process, because the psychological effects of the condition will naturally cause a physiological response in the body. You are what you think.

By changing your mindset and your approach to your condition, you can actively change how you feel and even take huge steps towards healing the condition. On the other hand, if you have a bad knee and you accept it—but still judge it rather harshly, as something that’ll hold you back in your life—that’s exactly what it’s going to do.

What I mean by changing your mindset is to take a different approach, which may actually help you overcome your ailment over the long term. In this case, if you stop thinking about all the things you can’t do because of your bad knee, and stop being held back by it, you’ll start to see life in a much more positive way. The healing process will have begun!

The placebo effect


Most people have heard of the placebo effect, but just so we’re on the same page, it involves someone taking a fake medicine, while believing it to be the real thing, and actually experiencing whatever effects they’re told that the medicine should have on them. Scientific research has proven, over and over again, that this has physical and psychological benefits.

The most common approach to the placebo effect is using a sugar pill. These are fairly harmless and have no real effect on the body, but people sometimes take these for conditions like bad knees, while believing the sugar pills to be real medicine. Even when they know the pills are sugar pills, this can drastically improve their condition.

Do we really need placebos?


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Not at all!

While placebo remedies such as sugar pills or therapy sessions can help, you can start your own healing process at home on your own, just by tuning into your body.

There are endless ways you can approach this, many of which you can find online. But it all begins with being mindful of your body, your mind and your thoughts. Start by thinking about your condition and really zeroing in on how you feel about it.

Are you judging it, both positively and negatively? Do you hate yourself or feel restricted by your condition? If so, become aware of these thoughts whenever they come up. Using the bad knee example, when it begins to hurt or the pain spikes, how does this make you feel?

Over time, you can start to introduce another approach, such as maintaining awareness of all the things you can do and focusing on your condition when you don’t feel like it’s affecting you. Over time, this will help you view your condition with a positive mindset.

Ideally, with a positive approach, you’ll start to rethink your life in such a way that your condition will no longer seriously bother you or hold you back. You’ll be a lot more proactive about trying new remedies and potential cures to make it better, and you’ll have a higher level of self-esteem and self-confidence when it comes to dealing with it.

As time goes on, you may even be able to cure your condition. If not, at least it won’t be keeping you down in the dumps.

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image 1: Pixabay; image 2: Pixabay

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