How Does Pain Cause Anxiety?
Pain can generate concern about recurrent cancer or the development of a new medical problem. If you have completed therapy only recently, there has not been time to build up the experience of having pains that are unrelated to cancer or its treatments. Pain can cause you to anticipate seeing a doctor. This anticipation can evoke many of the anxieties seen in “checkup anxiety” Many people have the misconception that cancer is usually a painful disease. When pain develops for whatever reason, you may fear that the pain is due to cancer and is the harbinger of greater pain. Many times this thought process works at a subconscious level.
How Does Anxiety Affect Pain?
Anxiety and pain feed each other in a vicious cycle. If your pain causes you to feel anxious, this anxiety can increase your perception of the pain; this increased perception of pain can cause increased anxiety; and so on.
Anxiety alone can create pain. Anxiety and uncertainty about your health may lead you to such a degree of self-monitoring that you are aware of every little change or sensation. Under normal circumstances a minor symptom would be noticed and then ignored, or not even perceived in the first place. Under circumstances of intense self-vigilance a minor symptom tends to be detected and even amplified. Anxiety about its significance and fear of progressive pain will increase both your anxiety and your level of pain.
If you have no medical problems with swallowing and no symptoms related to swallowing, try this simple experiment to demonstrate how pain and anxiety are related: pay attention to your swallowing for the next two minutes. Swallowing your saliva triggers a sequence of muscle contractions in the esophagus. If you pay attention to your normal swallowing, you become aware of sensations that are normally ignored. Intense concentration may even make it more difficult to initiate a swallow deliberately.
Simply paying attention to your body has altered your perception and created a symptom (difficulty in swallowing). Now, to take this experiment one step further, imagine that you are worried that your difficulty in swallowing saliva can mean that you have a serious medical problem. Anxiety about what your symptom means, added to your already heightened awareness of the symptom, magnifies your perception of the symptom and your anxiety level.
Just as your attention to and anxiety about a symptom can amplify your symptom and anxiety, your learning to distract yourself from the symptom and decrease your anxiety can bring relief. After cancer, symptom management includes breaking the vicious cycle of anxiety-pain.
Obviously, this approach is applicable only in the management of pain or symptoms that are not new and that have been properly evaluated. Your anxiety about a symptom is valuable in getting your attention and pushing you to have the symptom evaluated. Once you have done that, the anxiety is no longer serving a beneficial function and becomes counterproductive.
Anxiety is beneficial when it helps you do the right things. It is counterproductive if it persists after you do all the right things to take care of the anxiety-provoking problem.
What Makes Pain Worse?
•activities such as walking, maintaining a certain position, or eating certain foods
• weather conditions
• bowel or bladder function
• hormonal balance
• fatigue
• anxiety
• sleep deprivation
• depression
• deconditioning
• malnutrition
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Tags: Cancer
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