How Your Mind Can Effect Your Experience of Pain

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HOW YOUR MIND CAN AFFECT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF PAIN. One of the first things to understand about pain is that it is a subjective experience. This means that there is no-one who will feel pain or experience pain in the same way that you will. The next thing to understand is that there is, as yet, no scientific way of measuring the experience of pain in an objective way. There is no way of measuring the tension or the discomfort that any one of us experiences in our bodies. The experience of pain is not simply a sensation, or feeling due to some physical damage to our organs or tissues. The pain experience is one that includes emotion, thought and physical sensations. Our thoughts can and do affect the level of pain we experience. Our emotional connections affect the level of pain we experience. Due to this, it is more than possible to change our experience of pain, using the power of your thoughts, and harnessing your belief system in the most positive and amazing way. Not only can we reduce the pain, we can eliminate it. Pain can also be felt when the affected body part or limb has been removed. Many amputees experience what is known as Phantom Limb pain. Sensations interpreted as pain can be felt long after the limb is removed. These are memories and signals from the part of our brain that affects our emotions and thoughts. We knew there was an arm or a leg there; we still have an emotional attachment to that limb. Whether that is a longing for it to be part of us again, even with the pain associated with it, or whether we have a profound memory of the pain that was there. This demonstrates the complexity, but also the interconnectedness of the mind and the body. There have been numerous experiments and research projects into how our body and mind interprets pain and I will be relating to these throughout this essay. As more and more research and scientific
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