How full is your bucket?
This is a theory of understanding pain from neuroscience. Imagine a bucket filling up with all the physical (that old knee injury or walking with a dysfunctional movement pattern), emotional (caring about what is in the news or personal loss), and environmental (diet or air quality) experiences from your whole life. At the top of the bucket is a spigot. When the bucket gets full enough, the excess flows out of that spigot.
Our brains are amazing! They work really fast to take in information from all our sensory receptors and make decisions about what to do with this information. Our brain is constantly calculating risk/action based on current information as well as learned information from our past experiences. The primary (and often overriding) goal of the brain is to keep us alive in this moment. If you’ve ever struggled to make a decision or been unsure how to move your body, this is when the brain puts on the brakes to try and predict what action will keep us safe. The brain can put on the breaks even more when we are filled with stress or a sense of threat.
One way the brain can immediately put on the breaks is by sending an alarm of “Hey, that hurts!” Try this idea – pain is the brain’s interpretation of sensory input. Think of when a cool breeze feels refreshing or when it is uncomfortable/painful. Sometimes we can have an injury but not recognize any pain with it – think of the last time you noticed a bruise but could not remember how or when it happened. The pain signal will grow louder until we finally do something to change the sensory input.
In this metaphor, pain happens when there is overflow. This also describes the experience of “sometimes I do this and feel fine, other times the pain is so much I have to sit down.” If we look at pain as the brain interpreting ALL the information (not just the connection of our toe to the side table), then we can begin to manage pain in a different way. If your bucket is really full (lack of good sleep, dehydration, stressful world events…) the brain is more likely to send signals of pain. Some additional small stress can create a loud trigger to STOP.
So how can you work within this model to reduce pain – good news, there are a lot of choices ;)
Change the sensory input by changing your physical/visual perspective (simply shift your eyes, stand up, or move to a different location), touch the tips of your fingers to your thumb (this engages the many sensory receptors in your hands to change and refresh the information going to your brain). You can even change your attention to notice what you smell, see, touch, or hear.
Regulate your nervous system with things like slowing down, gentle movement, taking a deep breath, rubbing the skin around an area, or stepping into nature can all be ways to ground yourself.
Manage your physiology by building habits for quality sleep, drink some water, recognize foods that make you feel good or timing your food for highest physiological response.
Find things you can control like turning off the noise, stepping away from a person/conversation that is stressful, or even tidying a space to create some pleasing order. Think small! You cannot control everything, but you can find at least one thing that you can.
Retrain your movement this is a commitment to relearning how you move. The biggest requirement is to pay attention to how you move, how you hold yourself. Then try something different – it can be anything but notice how the change translates into your pain experience. The goal is to find more functional ways to move and do what you want instead of letting pain shut you down.
These techniques may not “cure” your pain forever, but in the moment of overwhelm they can give you space to reset. Using these tools can empower you to manage the constantly changing landscape that your brain is working to manage.