What causes delayed onset muscle soreness in cyclists. How can nutrition and lifestyle changes help alleviate DOMS. What are the best recovery techniques for sore muscles after cycling.

Understanding Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) in Cycling

Delayed onset muscle soreness, commonly known as DOMS, is a familiar experience for many cyclists. It typically manifests as an achy sensation 24 to 48 hours after a strenuous ride or workout. While the exact cause of DOMS remains somewhat elusive, it’s generally attributed to exercise-induced muscle damage or microscopic tears resulting from eccentric movements.

In cycling, eccentric movement occurs when muscles lengthen during contraction. For instance, the hamstrings undergo eccentric movement with each pedal stroke as they lengthen while pushing down on the pedals. This type of movement is particularly prevalent in cycling, making riders susceptible to DOMS, especially after intense workouts.

Is DOMS a Sign of a Good Workout?

While some degree of muscle soreness is normal after exercise, it’s important to understand that DOMS shouldn’t be a goal or a measure of workout effectiveness. Dr. Blair Callaghan, a physical therapist, emphasizes, “Feeling sore after a workout can feel like validation that you worked hard, [but] you shouldn’t seek that after every workout. DOMS is a sign of damage and fatigue.”

Excessive soreness can actually hinder your cycling performance and increase the risk of injury. When you’re sore, you may alter your riding posture or pedaling technique, which can lead to compensatory movements and potential injuries. The key is to find a balance where you’re challenging your muscles without causing excessive damage.

Nutritional Strategies to Prevent and Alleviate DOMS

Your diet plays a crucial role in managing muscle soreness. Here are some nutritional strategies that can help prevent and alleviate DOMS:

Antioxidant-Rich Foods

Incorporating antioxidant-rich foods into your diet can help combat inflammation and reduce muscle damage. Which foods are high in antioxidants? Berries (such as blueberries and pomegranates), cherries, and vegetables high in vitamins A, C, and E are excellent sources. These foods not only provide antioxidants but also offer a range of other health benefits.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids

Omega-3 fatty acids, particularly those found in fatty fish, can help maintain cell membrane integrity and reduce muscle soreness. How do omega-3s work? They incorporate themselves into the cell membranes of muscles, forming a protective barrier. This can help prevent the leakage of enzymes like creatine kinase, which contributes to muscle aches and cramps.

Vitamin D Supplementation

Vitamin D has been identified as a key agent in muscle repair and function. Research suggests that adequate vitamin D levels can improve muscle function and protect against injuries. Good dietary sources of vitamin D include fatty fish and dairy products.

Regular Protein Intake

Consuming protein throughout the day can help limit DOMS. Nate Dunn, a USAC Level 1 certified coach, recommends aiming for 20 to 30 grams of protein every three hours. This consistent “dosing” provides your muscles with a steady stream of amino acids, supporting muscle repair and recovery.

Lifestyle and Training Adjustments to Reduce DOMS

In addition to nutritional strategies, certain lifestyle and training adjustments can help minimize the occurrence and severity of DOMS:

• Gradual progression: Increase your training intensity and volume gradually to allow your muscles to adapt.
• Proper warm-up: Always include a thorough warm-up before intense rides to prepare your muscles for the work ahead.
• Consistent training: Regular, consistent training helps your body adapt to the demands of cycling, reducing the likelihood of severe DOMS.
• Adequate rest: Ensure you’re getting enough sleep and rest between workouts to allow for proper recovery.

Effective Recovery Techniques for Cyclists

Implementing effective recovery techniques can significantly reduce muscle soreness and improve your overall cycling performance. Here are some proven methods:

Active Recovery

Engaging in light, low-intensity exercise on your rest days can help alleviate muscle soreness. This could include a gentle spin on your bike, a leisurely swim, or a relaxed walk. Active recovery promotes blood flow to the muscles, helping to flush out metabolic waste products and deliver nutrients for repair.

Foam Rolling and Self-Massage

Foam rolling and self-massage techniques can help reduce muscle tension and improve flexibility. These methods can be particularly effective for targeting specific areas of soreness. How often should you foam roll? While it can be beneficial to incorporate foam rolling into your daily routine, pay special attention to it after intense rides or when you’re experiencing muscle tightness.

Compression Garments

Wearing compression garments during or after exercise may help reduce muscle soreness and speed up recovery. These garments work by improving blood flow and reducing muscle oscillation during activity.

Proper Hydration

Staying well-hydrated is crucial for muscle recovery. Adequate hydration helps transport nutrients to your muscles and removes waste products. How much should you drink? While individual needs vary, aim to drink enough water throughout the day so that your urine is pale yellow in color.

The Role of Sleep in Muscle Recovery

Quality sleep is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of muscle recovery and DOMS prevention. During sleep, your body releases growth hormone, which is essential for muscle repair and growth. Additionally, sleep helps regulate cortisol levels, which can impact inflammation and muscle soreness.

How much sleep do cyclists need? While individual needs vary, most adults should aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night. If you’re training intensively, you may benefit from even more sleep to support your recovery.

Tips for Improving Sleep Quality

1. Stick to a consistent sleep schedule, even on weekends.
2. Create a relaxing bedtime routine to help you unwind.
3. Ensure your bedroom is dark, quiet, and cool.
4. Limit exposure to blue light from electronic devices before bedtime.
5. Avoid caffeine and heavy meals close to bedtime.

Understanding the Limits: When Soreness Becomes a Concern

While some level of muscle soreness is normal after intense exercise, it’s important to recognize when soreness might indicate a more serious issue. Excessive or prolonged soreness could be a sign of overtraining or injury.

Signs That Your Soreness May Be More Than DOMS

• Pain that persists for more than 72 hours after exercise
• Sharp or stabbing pain, rather than a dull ache
• Swelling or redness in the affected area
• Pain that worsens with activity or rest
• Muscle weakness that doesn’t improve with time

If you experience any of these symptoms, it’s advisable to consult with a healthcare professional or a sports medicine specialist. They can help determine if your soreness is simply DOMS or if it’s indicative of a more serious condition that requires treatment.

Balancing Training Intensity and Recovery

Finding the right balance between training intensity and recovery is crucial for managing DOMS and improving your cycling performance. While challenging workouts are necessary for improvement, adequate recovery is equally important.

Periodization in Cycling Training

Periodization is a training approach that involves systematically varying training intensity and volume over time. This method can help reduce the risk of overtraining and excessive DOMS while optimizing performance gains.

How does periodization work? A typical periodization plan might include:

1. Base period: Focus on building endurance with longer, lower-intensity rides.
2. Build period: Gradually increase intensity and include more specific workouts.
3. Peak period: Highest intensity training, often leading up to a major event.
4. Recovery period: Reduced volume and intensity to allow for full recovery.

By structuring your training in this way, you can challenge your muscles sufficiently to promote adaptation while also allowing for adequate recovery, reducing the likelihood of excessive DOMS.

Listening to Your Body

One of the most important skills for any cyclist is learning to listen to their body. Pay attention to how you feel during and after rides. Are you consistently feeling excessively fatigued or sore? This might be a sign that you need to adjust your training intensity or incorporate more recovery time.

Remember, progress in cycling isn’t always linear. There will be times when you need to back off the intensity to allow for proper recovery. This doesn’t mean you’re losing fitness; rather, it’s an essential part of the adaptation process that will ultimately make you a stronger cyclist.

The Psychological Aspect of Dealing with DOMS

The psychological impact of DOMS shouldn’t be overlooked. Persistent muscle soreness can be frustrating and may even lead to decreased motivation or enjoyment of cycling. It’s important to maintain a healthy perspective on DOMS and understand that it’s a normal part of the training process.

Mindset Strategies for Coping with DOMS

• Reframe soreness as a sign of adaptation: While excessive soreness isn’t desirable, mild soreness can be viewed as your body adapting to the demands of training.
• Focus on progress, not perfection: Remember that improvement in cycling is a long-term process. Don’t let temporary setbacks discourage you.
• Practice self-compassion: Be kind to yourself when dealing with soreness. Allow yourself the time and care needed for recovery.
• Stay connected with your cycling community: Share experiences and tips with fellow cyclists. Sometimes, knowing others go through similar challenges can be reassuring.

By implementing these strategies and maintaining a positive mindset, you can navigate the challenges of DOMS more effectively and maintain your enthusiasm for cycling.

Leveraging Technology in DOMS Management

In today’s digital age, various technological tools can assist cyclists in managing DOMS and optimizing their recovery. These tools can provide valuable insights into your training load, recovery status, and overall fitness.

Training Load Monitoring

Many cycling computers and fitness trackers now offer training load monitoring features. These tools typically use metrics like Training Stress Score (TSS) or similar proprietary measures to quantify the intensity and duration of your rides.

How can training load monitoring help with DOMS? By tracking your training load over time, you can ensure you’re not increasing your workload too rapidly, which can lead to excessive soreness. Many of these tools also provide recommendations for recovery based on your recent training history.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Tracking

Heart rate variability is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. It’s considered a good indicator of your body’s readiness to train. Several smartphone apps and wearable devices now offer HRV tracking.

How does HRV relate to DOMS? Lower than normal HRV can indicate that your body is still recovering from previous training stress. By monitoring your HRV, you can make more informed decisions about when to push hard in training and when to focus on recovery, potentially reducing the occurrence of severe DOMS.

Recovery-Focused Apps

There are now numerous apps designed specifically to guide athletes through recovery routines. These may include guided foam rolling sessions, stretching routines, or meditation practices to help manage the stress associated with intense training.

While technology can be a valuable tool in managing DOMS, it’s important to remember that these tools should supplement, not replace, listening to your body and following sound training principles.

The Future of DOMS Research and Management

As our understanding of exercise physiology and recovery continues to evolve, new strategies for managing DOMS are likely to emerge. Researchers are continually exploring new avenues for enhancing recovery and reducing muscle soreness in athletes.

Emerging Areas of DOMS Research

• Genetic factors: Scientists are investigating how individual genetic variations might influence susceptibility to DOMS and response to various recovery strategies.
• Microbiome influence: There’s growing interest in how the gut microbiome might affect inflammation and muscle recovery.
• Novel nutritional interventions: Research continues into potential new supplements or nutritional strategies that could help mitigate DOMS.
• Advanced recovery technologies: From cryotherapy chambers to percussive therapy devices, new technologies are constantly being developed and refined to aid in recovery.

While these areas of research are promising, it’s important to approach new findings with a critical eye. Not all new strategies will prove to be effective for everyone, and the fundamentals of proper training, nutrition, and rest will likely remain the cornerstone of DOMS management for cyclists.

As we continue to learn more about DOMS and how to manage it effectively, cyclists can look forward to more personalized and effective strategies for optimizing their training and recovery. By staying informed about the latest research and being willing to experiment with new approaches (under appropriate guidance), you can continue to refine your approach to managing muscle soreness and improving your cycling performance.

Remember, the goal isn’t to eliminate DOMS entirely, but to manage it effectively so that it doesn’t interfere with your training or enjoyment of cycling. With the right combination of training, nutrition, recovery techniques, and mindset, you can minimize the impact of DOMS and maximize your potential as a cyclist.

How to Get Rid of Soreness

It’s the day after you sprinted a few extra hill repeats, survived a long-overdue squat session, or finally got back into your regular cycling routine, and your muscles feel like they are made of rocks lodged between your bones. You can thank a condition called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) for that.

Here, we lay out the causes and effects of DOMS and how to get rid of soreness so you can get back on the bike and ride your best.

Causes of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

Feeling sore after a hard ride is normal—even if it shows up a day or two after you’ve stopped pedaling. Delayed onset muscle soreness describes the achy sensation you feel 24 to 48 hours after exercise, the cause of which is still not exactly known. Many believe it’s the result of exercise-induced muscle damage or microscopic tears as a result of eccentric movement (when the muscle lengthens versus shortens, known as concentric).

For example, pushing down on the pedals is an eccentric movement for your hamstrings, which lengthen with every stroke. DOMS is common in cyclists because of that movement, especially after harder workouts, says Oliver Witard, Ph.D., senior lecturer in Exercise Metabolism and Nutrition at King’s College London and part of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute’s extended network of experts.

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Muscle soreness may also be a result of inflammation, a necessary part of cellular repair and recovery, which lessens as we adapt to exercise. But the degree of your DOMS discomfort doesn’t need to be so extreme that you avoid training because of it.

“DOMS is a natural occurrence, but you can control it so it doesn’t affect your workout the next day,” says physical therapist Gary Guerriero, co-owner of the U.S. Athletic Training Center. Adopting smart strategies that fit your lifestyle can make huge differences in your pain levels. “Consistency is key—whatever you’re doing, if you’re consistent, it will help you,” Guerriero adds.

Effects of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

Although some soreness is normal, you don’t necessarily want to celebrate DOMS. “Feeling sore after a workout can feel like validation that you worked hard, [but] you shouldn’t seek that after every workout,” says Blair Callaghan, D.P.T. “DOMS is a sign of damage and fatigue.”

“You sprain your ankle, then you’re going to walk differently; if you have DOMS, then you’re going to exercise differently,” she adds. “You sit in the saddle differently, you pedal differently, and you exert energy differently—and that’s how you end up injured. There’s no long-term or short-term benefit to being sore, so let your muscles catch up to the workload. Just because you’re not sore doesn’t mean you aren’t getting stronger.”

We tapped a panel of experts including Witard, Guerriero, and Callaghan to help you prevent DOMS and help you figure out how to get rid of soreness with nutrition and lifestyle changes, tips to ride in a way that produces less soreness, and postride recovery tricks. Get ready to get rid of sore muscles and make your training schedule stick.

What to Eat to Prevent DOMS

Aliaksandra Ivanova / EyeEm//Getty Images

1. Eat more antioxidants

There’s been some scrutiny of the claim that antioxidants decrease inflammation, but significant research suggests antioxidants blunt cell damage by strengthening the immune system and interrupting the domino-like damaging effects of free radicals that contribute to initial soreness and DOMS. However, foods containing antioxidants like vitamins A, C, and E—blueberries, pomegranates, and cherries, Witard says—offer benefits outside of antioxidants, so you might as well dig in.

2. Up your intake of healthy fat

Fat helps keep our cells intact. “Omega-3s like those in fish oil incorporate themselves into the cell membrane of the muscle and form a barrier, and they may preserve the cell membrane’s integrity,” Witard says.

The alternative is leaky cells that spill an enzyme called creatine kinase into your system, which contributes to muscle aches and cramps. Fatty fish (not fish oil supplements) pack the most significant amount of omega-3s, though the fish-averse can resort to foods such as flax seeds and spinach.

3. Consider supplementing with vitamin D

Witard also recommends adding vitamin D to your diet to help with soreness, which studies have identified as a key agent in expediting muscle repair. Other research has seen vitamin D improve muscle function and protect against injuries. Choose foods like fatty fish and dairy products for a vitamin D boost.

4. Graze on protein

You will best limit DOMS if you eat protein throughout the day, says Nate Dunn, a USAC Level 1 certified coach. Aim for 20 to 30 grams of protein every three hours. When you are “dosing” with protein all day, you are providing your muscles with a steady stream of amino acids—the building blocks of healthy muscle. It doesn’t have to be a complicated protein shake—snack on Greek yogurt, nuts, or whatever protein source you like best.

What to Do in Workouts to Prevent DOMS

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1. Start slow

The most basic rule of getting rid of and preventing muscle soreness is using progression. “You get DOMS when you bite off more than you can chew while training,” Dunn says. “Figure out where you’re coming from and work from there. Are you lean? Overweight? Active? Coming back from an injury? Honestly assess where you’re at.”

If you’re coming off the couch, he says, ride three times a week at most, with each ride lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. Utilizing a steady, progressive loading strategy is ideal for getting stronger without overwhelming your body.

3. Spin, don’t push

Maintaining a higher cadence will “minimize the amount of torque transferred to your joints and overall stress on your muscles,” Dunn says. “You want to stay in the 90 rpm range and get comfortable there before you start doing sprint intervals.” That means gear down and spin faster instead of gearing up and mashing on the pedals.

4. Know your limits—then push them

“There’s no problem with overreaching and giving yourself a big workout or a hard week of training, but after you overreach, accept that you wont feel as good,” says Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and the American College of Nutrition. “You have to scale back after pushing the limit so you don’t go over the edge and end up with a muscle injury. If you can do that, a week or two down the road, you’ll have improved fitness since your muscles have been pushed and had the opportunity to rebuild. Successive big weeks are overdoing it. And overdoing it is overtraining.”

For many of us, saddle time is sacred, but we can become stronger riders by supplementing cycling—even exchanging it—with other activities.

“It’s really difficult to say, ‘I’ll skip my ride and go to the pool and swim’ when that ride is what you look forward to doing,” Callaghan says. “But if you commit a day or two a week to lifting weights and supporting stabilizing muscles, you’ll be a healthy, well-rounded athlete, and I guarantee you’ll see improvement on the bike.” She recommends cyclists take one or two days a week to weight train, do yoga, swim, jog, or walk fast to vary muscle utilization and decrease stress on cycling-specific muscles.

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What to Do After You Ride to Prevent DOMS

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1. Refuel the right way

Our bodies use amino acids from protein to repair exercise-induced muscle damage. Supplement that process with a protein-packed snack between 30 and 60 minutes after working out, and then keep “dosing” to minimize DOMS by eating around 20 grams of protein after your workout for optimal recovery, recommends Nanci Guest, Ph. D., R.D. Choose snacks with whey protein for best results; whey contains the amino acid leucine, which helps initiate muscle protein synthesis.

2. Foam roll the pain away

Muscles fibers can knot up after exercise, but we can help them function more smoothly by breaking up these adhesions and scar tissue with self-massage using a foam roller.

“I’m a huge fan of the foam roller,” Callaghan says. “It mimics a soft tissue massage and increases blood flow and nutrition to injured muscles and heals them faster.”

Most foam rollers usually cost less than $50, and come in various sizes; that initial investment definitely pays off when you can soothe and prevent aches anywhere, any time. Roll out on the go or in front of your favorite Netflix show for significantly less dough than a regular professional massage. “There’s no excuse not to do it,” Callaghan says.

What to Do If the Pain Sets In

1.

Don’t rely on pain relievers

Witard suggests avoiding dependence on anti-inflammatory drugs or other pain relievers to get through a workout in the midst of DOMS recovery. It’s tempting to reach for the bottle of Advil after tough rides, but anti-inflammatories can do more harm than good; rather than solving your problem, these drugs simply mask it, allowing you to do more damage and feel worse later. Delaying soreness doesn’t alleviate it.

2. Seek help

If you feel plagued with DOMS after every workout, consider looking for a physical therapist who is experienced in helping cyclists. There are tons of (less accessible) alternative therapies, Guerriero says, from cryotherapy to acupuncture to electric-stim massage to floatation therapy.

“The hard thing is finding someone good who does these things,” he adds, so before signing up with the nearest PT, assess your options, and don’t be afraid to ask questions about how they deal with DOMS.

Should I Still Work Out When I’m Sore?

Exercise,Safety and Injury Prevention

April 02, 2020

After a hard workout, your body may experience some muscle soreness. While aches and pains are a normal part of exercise, you may be wondering whether to let your body recover or to forge ahead through your next workout. The answer varies, depending on how you’re feeling and what level of physical fitness you’re at. Here’s a look at why exercise causes soreness and whether you should still tie on those running shoes when you’re hurting.

How Working Out Causes Soreness

Muscles go through physical stress when we exercise. While this stress provides numerous health benefits and is the key to growing stronger, soreness is the unfortunate outcome of new or enhanced activity. Why? During exercise, the fibers within muscles stretch and experience microscopic tears. This causes soreness, stiffness and overall fatigue. During the healing process, your body builds those muscles up, creating increased strength.

Muscle Pain May Be Delayed 

When you start a new exercise regimen or begin working out after a long period of inactivity, you will likely experience delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). This refers to when pain appears 24 to 48 hours after engaging in physical activity beyond what your muscles are accustomed to. That soreness may last as much as a week. Fortunately, as your muscles experience less tearing with regular exercise, this muscle soreness should decrease over time.

Exercising When Your Body Is Sore

If you continue your usual exercise regimen even when you’re sore, you’re not giving your muscles enough time to heal. In fact, pushing yourself during a bout of soreness can eventually lead to an overuse injury. Overall, you’re at risk of causing harm to your body by not resting.

For those trying to get in shape or lose weight through exercise, there’s no need to worry. If you’re experiencing muscle soreness, you may need only two or three days of rest. Another option is to alternate your workouts to avoid overusing certain muscle groups. For example, if your upper body is sore, work out your lower body the next time you exercise instead. This will allow you to stay on track and not derail your progress.

Recovering After a Hard Workout

The term “active recovery” refers to continuing to move during a period of rest. It’s a great strategy for those who need time to heal but also want to prevent stiffness and stay healthy. If you’re ultra sore after a hard workout, skip the weights and go for a walk instead. Or, try swimming laps or doing a gentle yoga class. There also are many options for relieving soreness in-between periods of active recovery. Consider taking Epsom salt baths, getting a massage and alternating between ice and heat. Lastly, don’t forget to eat well and get lots of sleep.

Work Out Without Overdoing It

Prevention is key to keeping yourself on a steady exercise regimen. The best way to do this is by listening to your body. With experience, you’ll find the balance between pushing yourself to get stronger and taking a step back. Only you know how hard you can work out before risking an injury. 

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How to deal with pain – Lifehacker

Life

Health

January 20, 2014

There are different ways to deal with pain without medication. Some are based on physiological characteristics, others on psychological and emotional factors.

Iya Zorina

Author of Lifehacker, athlete, CCM

Physical pain is something that a person regularly experiences throughout his life. But is it true that the sensation of pain depends only on physical factors? Indeed, in different situations, people react to the same stimulus in different ways. It turns out that psychological attitudes and emotions are also of great importance. How can you cope with them and what can be changed to increase the pain threshold or not feel pain at all?

Despite the greenhouse conditions of life, we still face pain almost every day: a tooth inflamed, a finger hit the corner of a closet, a mote got into the eye with a contact lens. And that’s not to mention accidental injuries, like “slipped and broke his arm,” and all sorts of illnesses.

Painful sensations can bring pleasure only in case of psychological disorders or in cases when they are associated with pleasant events, but in general they are perceived as something sharply negative. Fortunately, there are ways to cope with pain without any pills and injections, but first you need to delve into its nature.

The nature of pain

There are nerve endings on the skin and surfaces of internal organs that are needed to assess damage to the body. There are especially many of these endings on the cornea of ​​​​the eye and the pulp of the tooth, so toothache is considered one of the most unbearable.

As a rule, the pain is not felt in a specific place, but spreads over a wide area. This variety is called protopathic, it is often found in severe injuries and damage to internal organs.

However, protopathic pain is not the only type. There is also an epicritic, which is necessary to quickly conduct a pain sensation and convey accurate information about the size of the lesion. This pain is not particularly severe.

Knowledge of these varieties and allow you to deduce the first way to get rid of severe pain.

1. Wedge wedge

It sounds strange, but it turns out that a little pain can help with severe pain. This feature was used two centuries ago, when during the extraction of a tooth, the dentist’s assistants pinched the patient, distracting him from the main source of sensations. The point is that epicritical sensitivity is able to suppress protopathic .

Experiments by neurophysiologists have confirmed that epicritical pain inhibits the excitation of nerve cells from protopathic pain. As a result, protopathic excitation does not reach the brain at all, which means that a person does not feel severe pain.

This may explain the fact that when a person experiences suffering, for example, from an injury, he bites his lips or digs his nails into his palm. At least this way you can distract yourself until the doctor arrives and gives you an anesthetic injection.

2. The meaning of pain

The sensation of pain directly depends on what meaning is attached to it. For example, in different cultures, labor pain is perceived differently: somewhere, women can work until the last and go about their business and start again immediately after the birth of a child.

In Western cultures, labor pain is given great importance and a woman is initially set up for suffering, because of which they are really experienced in the process of childbirth.

It has been proven that concentration on pain sensations and expectation intensify them several times, and hence the following way to avoid pain follows – try not to pay attention to it and not attach much importance to it .

In addition, the pain subsides if a person is sure that everything will pass soon. For example, when patients were given placebo pills during a study, their discomfort was reduced. Scientists attribute this to the release of endorphins from the expectation of imminent relief.

3. Emotional background

No less important is a person’s mood, the emotional background that accompanies pain. This position can be confirmed by the research of the physician G.K. Becher, who observed the perception of pain by wounded soldiers during the Second World War.

The doctor noticed that wounded soldiers needed less morphine to relieve pain than people in peacetime after surgery. Becher attributed this to the emotional state of a person: the soldiers were happy that they were alive, while people after a surgical operation, as a rule, are pessimistic and easily depressed.

Thus, a positive attitude is of great importance for the perception of pain – another reason to become an optimist .

4. Self-hypnosis and mood

A large number of experiments and experiments prove that a person’s psychological attitudes strongly influence the sensation of pain. For example, athletes often do not feel pain in competitions because their entire attention is directed towards achieving the highest goal – victory.

One study by scientists from the University of Oxford once again confirms the importance of mental factors. The experiment involved 12 students, among whom were Catholics, atheists and agnostics. During the experiment, the participants were shown two paintings: “Lady with an Ermine” and “Madonna”, painted by Sassoferrato, a 17th-century painter. After showing the picture, scientists started up an electric discharge.

The experiment showed that religious students after watching “Madonna” felt less pain from an electric discharge than agnostics and atheists. At the same time, after watching “Lady with an Ermine,” all participants felt approximately the same level of pain.

Thus, the mental state of believers who saw the image of their faith changed, which allowed them to feel less pain. The author of the experiment stressed that the same state can be achieved through meditation.

The following can be deduced from this: any mental attitude aimed at suppressing pain really suppresses it . Such an effort can be prayer, meditation, an attitude that there is no pain or it subsides, or even such a childish method as repeating to yourself: “It doesn’t hurt. ”

If you have your own ways to cope with pain (not medication), please share in the comments.

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• 5 easy ways to improve your health
• The brain is the master of pain and the great deceiver
• Why my head hurts in the morning: 5 common causes

One easy way to deal with pain and negative emotions

Life

July 4, 2017

There are times in life when you need to get over a heartache quickly and move on. There is one easy way to transform negative emotions.

CamMi Pham

Marketer, founder of ThinkRenegade agency, blogger.

When you are in pain, give yourself five minutes to yell, cry, and beat your pillow: feel the negative energy as intensely as possible. But stop exactly five minutes later. And use your sadness as a motivator to get active.

We all have times when we feel sad, jealous, go crazy with envy, miss our loved ones, get depressed, when it seems to us that the world is collapsing. All these feelings can visit a person from time to time, or they can wait for us at the most inopportune moment, when we least expect a blow of fate.

Many feel that negative feelings should be ignored. Philosophers and psychologists break spears on how to get rid of negative emotions.

The truth is that there is no joy without pain. If we were always happy with everything, life would seem pretty bland to us. No one would be able to sense anything in principle.

It is not really necessary to think exclusively positively. Just positive thinking allows you to push your pain, and therefore your problem deeper into yourself.

However, if you do not work with negative emotions, they will follow you everywhere and poison your life.

Try to be selfish: try to overcome your sadness in an unusual way. Convert feelings into actions.

• Be very aware that right now you are overwhelmed with negative emotions or pain.
• If you are sad, put your story or incident on paper, tell other people that you are having difficulty. Perhaps you are not alone in your feelings and your story will be a testament to other people that they are not alone.
• If you miss someone, write about how that person inspires you. Maybe even an interesting story will come out of this.
• If you don’t like someone, read their favorite book. Perhaps this will help you understand the person better.
• If you are jealous of someone, put your energy into learning a skill that that person excels at. Maybe one day you will be even better than him.
• If you have thoughts about death, just do a good deed – help someone. You will feel a huge surge of strength and a thirst for life when you feel that there are people who need you.

Let your negative emotions and your pain inspire you to do what you really love to do.

Don’t hesitate and don’t hesitate – do it. Transform the pain into a new form.

Write a book, paint a picture, compose a song. Cook something delicious. Go to the gym.