Throughout my journey with chronic illness, pain was probably the most frustrating symptom to deal with. Pain has a way of taking over so many aspects of your life. You start planning around discomfort, abstaining from certain social interactions, and constantly doing some sort of movement to try and give yourself a few moments of peace. This was my reality for a number of years.
I first started noticing something wrong in high school, when I would get moderate discomfort after a demanding day of school work or a strenuous workout. This pain would come and go, but did not take over my life in any significant way. It was rather just a gentle nudge that something was wrong. I also found that by taking some stretching breaks from work and improving my form during exercising I could get everything under control. I assumed I had it all figured out, but university had other plans.
Being an overachiever in high school with STEM related interests, I chose to enrol in a difficult mathematics and engineering program. I was operating in a mode of constant stress, working constantly on either school work or my engineering design teams. My spare time was filled with excessive alcohol and marijuana consumption, which was coupled with a classic university diet of primarily processed foods. To make matters worse, my second year apartment was a musty basement that that likely exposed me to significant amounts of toxic mold. All these factors created the perfect storm for my descent into significant chronic pain.
My pain stopped becoming something that I could manage and completely took over my life. I would regularly lose sleep due to discomfort and would have to place ice packs on my back or take ibuprofen just to feel a little bit of relief. This all took a serious toll on my mental health, as I began to reconsider whether I would ever be able to work a real job or be a functioning member of society given my extreme symptoms. Given that my father had also been dealing with debilitating chronic pain for many years, I thought that this was going to be how it was for the rest of my life and it made me miserable. If someone were to have told me that a few years later my pain would become first manageable, and then completely non-existent, I wouldn’t have believed them. Yet, I now sit here writing this today pretty much entirely free of chronic pain, one of the greatest miracles I could ever have asked for. In this post I’m going to share with you exactly what I learned on my journey healing from chronic pain, including what actually causes pain to become chronic and the strategies that worked best for me to become pain free.
Drivers of Chronic Pain
At its core, pain is your brain’s alarm system. It is not, as most of us intuitively assume, just a direct readout of tissue damage. You can have significant structural damage and feel very little, and you can feel debilitating pain with no identifiable injury at all. Pain is a signal produced by the brain and nervous system based on the information it receives.
Your tissues contain specialized nerve endings called nociceptors which respond to stimuli that are potentially harmful like heat, tension, pressure and chemicals irritants. When activated, they send electrical signals that travel through the spinal cord and ultimately reach the brain, where the signal is processed and pain is actually generated. Note that the brain is not a passive receiver here, it actively modulates how much pain to produce based on perceived threat level.
Inflammation makes this system louder. When tissue is damaged or irritated, immune cells release chemical messengers like inflammatory cytokines and prostaglandins. These chemicals sensitize local nociceptors, effectively lowering their firing threshold. This means that nerves that perviously required significant stimulation to activate now require far less. This sensitization is why an inflamed area feels tender and why touch that would normally feel painless can be very uncomfortable. The underlying signal coming to the brain has been amplified before it arrives.
When pain signals persist for an extended period, the nervous system itself begins to change, becoming increasingly sensitive through a process called central sensitization. Through neuroplasticity, the brain adapts to your situation and becomes better at producing pain. With every pain flare up, this pattern is reinforced and eventually the alarm system begins firing with very little provocation. This is how pain becomes chronic, it no longer becomes just a symptom of ongoing damage but rather becomes its own self-sustaining pattern.
The brain is the master regulator of the entire pain process. Physical tension and tissue damage feed pain signals upwards. These same signals can be amplified by inflammation. However, it is ultimately the brain that decides the output, and a brain operating under chronic stress and a heightened perceived threat level will consistently dial that output up. Resolving chronic pain requires working at all three levels: reducing the inflammatory inputs that sensitize the system, addressing the physical tension patterns and sources of toxicity that generate the signal, and working with the nervous system itself to down-regulate a sensitized central pain response.
Addressing Physical Tension
After working with a number of different practitioners of various backgrounds with limited success, I began working with a physiotherapist who really seemed to have a deeper understanding of the body, the etiology of pain and the bigger picture of holistic health. We began working on specific exercises to re-establish my mind-body connection, helping work the right muscles in the right situations, improve overall flexibility and mobility, and ultimately live my life with significantly less tension. By building back this understanding of exactly how to move my body and work specific stabilizer muscles I began to move and feel much better. I also began working with an osteopath, who gave me treatments that helped correct temporary imbalances and helped address specific problematic tension patterns in my lifestyle that were driving my pain. Both of these modalities were instrumental in helping me feeling comfortable in my own body again.
I also began a daily yoga practice, something I’ve maintained to this day. Few things gave me such immediate symptom relief. It wasn’t a root cause fix, but it helped me integrate the movement patterns I was working on with my physio, improved lymphatic drainage to support my body’s detoxification, and down-regulated my nervous system through its breathing and mindfulness components. It was one of the few things that addressed all three drivers of my pain simultaneously.
If you are dealing with chronic pain, I’d encourage you to seek out practitioners who genuinely understand anatomy, movement, and the bigger picture. That could be a physiotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor, massage therapist, or someone else entirely. The credential matters less than the person. In my experience this space has as many practitioners who don’t quite grasp the full picture as ones who do, so don’t be discouraged if your first or second attempt doesn’t land. Finding the right fit is worth the search.
Addressing Inflammation and Toxicity
Of all the changes I made, dietary ones produced the most dramatic results. I had always understood that certain food choices can drive inflammation, but hadn’t appreciated just how directly the foods I was eating were contributing to my symptoms.
What I came to understand that my diet was doing more than just driving inflammatory processes. Certain compounds in the foods I was eating were causing direct cellular damage, irritating tissues, disrupting gut integrity, and generating a nociceptive signal in their own right. The inflammatory response then followed: my immune system attempted to repair that damage by releasing cytokines and sensitized local nociceptors in the process. Both of these contributed to my pain, and is why fixing my diet produced such significant symptom relief.
My first successful experiment began when I started doing a ketogenic diet. By significantly reducing carbohydrates, I was able to reduce the glycation damage they caused directly, as well as down-regulate the insulin driven increased inflammatory response from excess carbohydrates. This did not eliminate my pain, but made it far more manageable alongside my physical wellness modalities.
Going strict carnivore, eating only meat and eliminating all plant foods, really put my pain into remission and was the first time I genuinely experienced being pain free for days on end. This was likely due to the direct nociceptive effect that many plant compounds have on sensitized tissues. By removing all plant foods, I had eliminated an entire category of potential triggers including oxalates, lectins, salicylates and essential oils, reducing both direct tissue irritation and the inflammatory response they provoke.
I also came to realize that there were sources of inflammation and toxicity that were contributing to my pain outside of my diet. My exposure to toxic mold and the corresponding inflammatory response proved to be significant drivers of symptoms. Finding pathogenic overgrowths of bacteria during stool testing when symptoms began quietly returning was also a subtle contributor. Addressing both of these issues and getting to the root cause were important steps in getting long-term symptom relief.
Addressing the Nervous System
I first learned about the pain-fear cycle and the relationship between the brain and generating pain signals from the book The Way Out, which was recommended to me by my physiotherapist. In this book, Alan Gordon describes his approach to solving chronic pain, in which he used somatic tracking. This involves using mindfulness to observe your pain without judgement. The goal is to teach your brain that it is not in danger and that there is no need to send pain signals. Having already reduced my inflammatory load through diet meant that when flare ups did occur, they were less severe and less frequent. This made the somatic work far more accessible. It is much easier to observe pain without fear when the pain itself is no longer overwhelming. From that calmer baseline I was able to recognize flare ups for what they were: a sensitized nervous system misfiring, not a signal of genuine damage, and respond accordingly.
I also joined an online limbic system retraining group called Wired 4 Healing. This group emphasized using various tools like breathing techniques, gratitude, affirmations, and similar mindfulness techniques as Alan Gordon described. These helped change my relationship to my symptoms and shifted my mindset to one of illness to one of healing. This was similarly transformative and in conjunction with my dietary experiments lead me to experience long-term pain remission.
What I Recommend
Ultimately each of us developed chronic pain for different reasons, and our symptoms reflect different imbalances unique to our own bodies and histories. There is no one size fits all approach to healing, and chronic pain is no different. However, taking a multi-modal approach, working on all drivers of pain simultaneously, gives you the greatest chance of success. I strongly encourage those suffering to seek out knowledgeable practitioners who can help address the physical tension and structural imbalances that may be driving their symptoms. As for the nervous system and inflammatory picture, this is where I can help. I would be honoured to get the chance to work with you so we can get you back to feeling like yourself again. I know what it feels like to have pain consume every aspect of your life. It doesn’t have to be this way, and together we can get to the bottom of it.