An injured ankle & a physical therapist equals an a-ha moment #MondayBlogs #LifeLessons

It’s always fun to have an a-ha! moment at a totally inappropriate moment (sarcasm intended). Like last week. I was trying to not kick my physical therapist in the gonads as he ‘massaged’ my injured ankle. While I was successfully ignoring the man, he decided to start a lecture on pain levels and pain management. How apropos! At this point, I lost the battle to not roll my eyes. Luckily, he was paying attention to my injury and not my lack of respect.

So, what was his lecture about? Apparently, pain is universal. No matter your ethnicity or culture, we all experience pain on pretty much the same level. This is the pain scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being extreme pain. The difference is in how we react to such pain. You have a high pain tolerance when you just suck it up until you hit a level 7 or 8. Your pain tolerance is said to be low if you start whining at a 2.

My therapist then went on to explain how much movement I was allowed to make with my injured ankle based on my pain level. Basically, he explained as follows: Pain at a 7 or below won’t permanently damage your body or harm your injury. Pain above a 7 is your body telling you to stop or it’s going to injure itself.

At this point, I had to screw my mouth shut to stop myself from shouting a-ha! Not because I finally understood how much pain is okay when I injure myself (although that is useful information and I did spend last week responding to my every question about my ankle with an assessment of my pain level).

Instead I was thinking about all the obstacles we confront in our lives. From small stuff – a computer crash causing a loss of a day’s work – to the big stuff – the death of a loved one. What if I looked at life’s obstacles on this pain scale? For example, small obstacles are merely twinges of low level pain, which should be dealt with quickly and then simply forgotten as they don’t do any permanent damage to my life.

Take that computer crash example. It’s definitely irritating, but on the obstacles of life scale it’s probably only a 2. Once I get my computer up and running again, I can re-do the work. Sometimes, I’ll even find a temporary file containing the latest changes! The only thing I’ve actually lost is time. Instead of being pissed off, getting completely off track and losing tons of time being irritated, I should just deal with it and move on as if it were a level 2 pain.

I’m not sure successful I will be on my new obstacles of life scale plan but having a plan is the first step to success, right?