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Emotions, food and lack of sleep can all be potent triggers of pain signals in your body. Here's a way to use your subconscious mind to try to lessen the impact of those triggers.

Emotions

The subconscious maintains an encyclopedic record of every event that ever happened to you. This can embed emotions in your pain, a condition that your subconscious may be able to address.

Because it has no ability to reason inductively , the subconscious makes blind associations between things that have no logical relationship. Over a lifetime this process can cause a number of negative associations to be linked to your pain.

These factors may be operating in back pain or pain in the neck or other extremities, arthritis pain, fibromyalgia pain, or neuropathic pain (nerve pain).

These associations can exist even if you've consciously worked through issues such as anger, fear, or shame. These emotions can still be blindly and perhaps mistakenly associated with your pain at a subconscious level. It's important to identify those associations and weaken them to help relieve the pain.

Likewise, it's important to strengthen certain positive emotions. When you're in severe pain it's hard to generate calm, gratitude, kindness and other good feelings.

Emotions and Visualization

Both negative and positive emotions can be addressed at the subconscious level using visualization statements to possibly ease the pain.

Visualization statements represent the specific language that your subconscious wants you to read back to it to help ease your pain. They're simple and are targeted directly at the main factors that could bring you relief.

You can obtain these statements by learning how to communicate directly with your own subconscious mind. The process is straightforward and can be done at home by working with a facilitator over the telephone. You you need no special skills and no previous experience in working with the subconscious.

Reducing the Pain Emotion Signal

In addition to visualizing being free from certain negative emotions and being filled with certain positive ones, it may be possible to reduce the pain emotion signals that are physically transmitted to your brain when you're in chronic pain.

Emotions about your pain appear to reach the brain by different pathways than the pain itself. If you can focus the subconscious on the emotional signals that are generated along these pathways, you may be able to cut back on the emotional distress associated with

Most pain conditions seem to have deep emotions involved. These are unique to each person and usually can be discovered and addressed through visualizations.

Food

The subconscious may recommend that you temporarily stop eating certain foods to help reduce your pain. Usually these are foods that are quite common in the diet.

The foods to be avoided tend to fall into two classes:

• Foods to avoid for the short term, usually 30 to 60 days. These are foods to which you may have developed a sensitivity due to having eaten them too frequently for a long period of time. After taking a break from these foods you may be able to slowly reintroduce them into your diet with little or no problem.

• Foods to avoid for the long term, sometimes permanently. These are foods to which you may be allergic. It's useful to stop eating these foods for a short time to see if the pain lessens. But before giving them up permanently it's advisable to have food allergy testing done.

One group of foods that seem to aggravate pain, particularly that of arthritis , are the nightshade vegetables--potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and bell peppers. If the subconscious feels these are implicated in your pain, you may want to try giving them up for a month or so to see if your joints become less painful.

Food issues may also be operating in back pain or pain in the neck or other extremities, or fibromyalgia pain.

The subconscious may indicate that drinking more water will help you to alleviate pain. If so, it may recommend that you drink half a quart to a quart per day more than you do now.

Sleep

Sleep is fundamental to the production of dopamine. When dopamine is in low supply, pain can seem much worse than usual. This makes it harder to sleep, which further reduces your supply of dopamine, thereby increasing your perception of pain.

Lack of sleep may be a factor in back pain or pain in the neck or other extremities, arthritis pain, fibromyalgia pain, or neuropathic pain (nerve pain).

Visualizations may be able to help you sleep better despite your pain.

You can't use the subconscious to break this vicious cycle overnight. But you can read the visualization statements about sleep that your subconscious suggests. This may involve visualizing things such as the following:

• That you're able to find a comfortable position to sleep in.

• That you're able to stay asleep despite your pain.

• That you're able to get back to sleep quickly if you do awaken.

• That you're able to get sound and refreshing sleep.

• That you're able to handle the poor sleep of fibromyalgia.

Because sleep and your level of pain perception are so closely related, even a small gain in one area may trigger a gain in the other. For example, if visualizations such as the above improve your sleep just a little, you may find that your pain is slightly reduced. This in turn might help you sleep even better, which reduces pain even further.

Engaging the Subconscious

The subconscious is quite powerful. When programmed through the very visualizations that it suggests, it may be able to turn episodes of uncontrolled pain into events over which you have a degree of control.

Ben Plumb is CEO and President of The Visualization Group, Inc. The company's service is delivered by people like himself who personally suffered from years of chronic pain, and used the visualization method described in this article to obtain relief when nothing else worked.