14/08/2025
📚🐾 What My Dog Taught Me About Pain (and How to Outsmart It)
Last week, while I was preparing for a Birth Skills talk at an antenatal day, my dog Sadie decided that my laptop was not the most important thing in the room. She has a special talent for completely stealing my attention — and it reminded me of something I tell expectant moms about managing contraction pain.
One of the key tools in labour is making your non-painful sensations bigger. When we focus on other strong, pleasant, or neutral sensations, the brain gives them priority — and they can block or dampen pain signals coming through.
This “gait control” principle isn’t just for labour — it’s also a huge part of how we manage chronic pain.
💡 Here’s the thing: when something hurts, our instinct is to avoid moving because we don’t want to make it worse. But over time, avoiding movement can decondition our bodies and make pain more persistent. That’s why, in physiotherapy, we often include exercises that keep you strong without flaring up your pain.
And here’s the really cool part:
Even if you only exercise a completely pain-free area — say you have lower back pain but you work your arms for 30–60 minutes — the body still releases:
✨ Endorphins that reduce pain perception
✨ Anti-inflammatory myokines from active muscles that calm inflammation
✨ Signals that can “reopen” some of the body’s natural opioid receptors, which can become less responsive in long-term pain
So if you’ve been living with chronic pain, sometimes the best place to start is with the areas that don’t hurt — and make them bigger in your life.
Just like Sadie makes herself bigger than whatever I’m doing, you can “get bigger than your pain” by filling your brain and body with other strong, positive sensations.
🐶❤️ And maybe, just maybe, let your dog remind you to shift your attention to what feels good.
