Dealing with Pain – A Martial Artist’s Frequent Companion – Part III

There are mental skills we can acquire that enable us to better deal with pain. And there are also old, traditional methods for toughening our bodies, making us less susceptible to injury and thereby effectively preventing pain from being introduced – or introduced at a lower level, making it easier or unnecessary to manage. I’ll likely look at both.

We have a wide array of drugs available today for dealing with pain. These can be taken by mouth or delivered into the blood stream or injury site by injection. Pain specialists can use scalpels or even radio waves to sever or disrupt pain nerves. But most of the drugs have very negative side effects. And none of the methods available to us will be of much use when needed most, during a serious fight. We need methods that are readily available (meaning always with us).

Pain is a wonderful notification system that has evolved over millions of years and serves a very important function. Without it, we would not likely he here. Pain informs us of a problem somewhere within our bodies, enabling us to take counter measures before permanent injury can occur or get medical help to mend it. It tells us to remove our hands from a fire or hot stove, to bend our elbows or knees before our arms or legs break, to mend a cut before we bleed out, and so on.

But once it has informed us of a problem during a fight, it needs to be switched off so it doesn’t prevent us from taking appropriate action. If a person gets punched in the nose and thinks only about how badly his nose hurts, he is soon likely to have more body parts in need of attention. We need to be able to forget about our noses and focus only on defeating the person who hit us. Then, after the fight is over, we can turn our attention back to our noses.

Psychologically, we’re capable of many things, both positive and negative, which many feel are beyond our power to control. We often hear of high powered business executives who die shortly after retiring, no longer faced by the challenges which made life enjoyable for them. When a spouse dies, it’s often not long before the other dies too, often within weeks. Following a severe injury or a bout with some disease, people often surprise their doctors when the live or die. They are sometimes deemed to have lived “because they wanted to bad enough." They die because they "simply gave up."

We are capable of both increasing and decreasing our sensitivity to pain and the effects it has on us in emergency or training situations. All that is needed to increase our pain tolerance in many situations is information and a few psychological skills. We’ll look at some of these in coming posts.

Thanks for your continued support.