Natural Ways to Manage Back Pain
Conventional medical approaches to back pain will often concentrate on solving the anatomical problems of the lower back. For daily management, however, natural remedies can play a huge part.
Below are natural ways to alleviate back pain for chronic sufferers:
1. Find ways to boost your inner endorphins.
Endorphins are hormones your body makes naturally. What a lot of people don’t realize is that they can be equally potent as any manufactured pain medicine. When released, endorphins keep pain signals from being perceived by your brain as pain. They also help control depression, stress and anxiety, which are all known to worsen chronic back pain.
2. Get enough sleep.
A key cause of insomnia, a condition where a person has a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep, is pain. Around two-thirds of chronic back pain sufferers also deal with type of sleep disorder. Absurdly, insufficient sleep can increase your back pain. With this nasty cycle, it will be ineffective to treat only the pain. If you have problems sleeping, you should address them too.
3. Build up your core.
Your lower spine depends heavily on your abdominal and back muscles for support. Since these muscles are rarely worked out in the course of a typical day, you have to target them specifically through exercise. There are several easy exercises that can be performed in 20-30 minutes as part of your everyday routine. Sitting upright on an exercise ball for half an hour once a day is a great start.
4. Use hot/cold therapy.
Cold application does two things – it eases inflammation, which is typically a culprit in any kind of back pain, and it slows down your nerve impulses, preventing spasms and the resulting pain. On the other hand, heat application will stimulate blood flow, allowing healing nutrients to be more efficiently transported to the affected area, and preventing the pain signals from being received by the brain.
5. Give your hamstrings a good stretch daily.
One of the more usually overlooked triggers of lower back pain is tight hamstrings (back thigh muscles). If they are too tight, they put a strain on your lower back and sacroiliac joints, and that would mean more pain. The simplest answer to this problem is to stretch your hamstrings at least twice daily.
6. Have a busy brain.
Pain specialists have long discovered that pain is not absolute, being so much more complex than a mere sensation. The way your brain processes and interprets pain signals plays a crucial role in your perception of pain. The good news is they’ve also discovered techniques that develop a person’s skills for reducing or ignoring pain signals. If you suffer from chronic back pain or any other type of longstanding pain, studying and perfecting these skills can give you life-changing benefits.
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