Welcome to the Ask Adam Episodes.

Today’s question: Should I keep a pain journal?

The answer is absolutely not.

Often doctors and chiropractors and physical therapists tell people to keep pain journals. The more you focus your attention on your pain, the greater your pain.
Because what neuroscience has proven over the last 10, 20, 30 years is that the cause of chronic pain actually originates in the brain. And then there’s these physical changes that create pain, tingling, burning, numbness and weakness.

If the problem starts in your brain, focusing on your pain is only going to escalate the problem and actually make it worse.

Take your pain journal and put it through a meat grinder and serve it up as sausage or something, because that’s the last thing you want to do.

What you do want to do is focus between your ears. What we know for sure – everybody knows that stress and tension exacerbate pain.
You know that.

What you probably don’t know is that what you do in your brain to create the stress, to create the tension, to create the anxiety, is actually what causes, and starts and creates your pain once and for all.

Now, it doesn’t sound logical to you because it’s not what you’ve heard. If you break your foot, it really hurts. That’s acute pain; it hurts. Six weeks later, it’s healed.

Anything that lasts longer than six weeks or keeps coming back – the old football injury, has nothing to do with that original injury. Most likely, it’s originating here. Again, there’s these physical problems and the end result is pain, tingling, burning, numbness and weakness.

Can you get better? 97% says yes. I sound like Jeopardy! There. If you go to zeropainnow.com and you take the pain test, in two minutes you’re going to know, pretty certainly, whether or not you can get better. Then you can take steps from there.

Go and do that now.

Take your pain journal … you got other things to do. Let’s worry about getting you pain-free and keeping you pain-free once and for all.