I’m leery of developing increased physical awareness. At any given moment, if I care to notice it, I start feeling mild pain in random parts of my body. As long as I’m not paying attention to the pain, it’s not there, but when I start to think about how, say, my legs are feeling, I notice that there’s a bit of pain there that wasn’t there before because I wasn’t thinking about it. So I often try to suppress physical awareness by focusing on absorbing activities such as reading, etc. Am I wrong in expecting that increasing my physical awareness would also mean increasing my awareness of annoying (mild) pains that I’d prefer to just shut out completely?
This was certainly my experience. That said, my experience was also that I stopped experiencing such mild pains as something aversive. I suspect the two were related.
If there’s pain there’s probably a reason for that pain. Simply associating all pain is no good long term strategy.
If you become aware that your legs are in pain it usually results in changing the position of your legs. Your body might also increase the blood flow in the tissue on which you focus your attention.
There are a number of meditation exercises that have components where you try to focus on a painful sensation and stop experiencing it as aversive. I don’t know if this would counteract the negative affect of noticing pain. Of course, there might be actual reasons why you’re in pain; posture, not exercising enough, not stretching, exercising too much, etc etc. My brain wants to say that it’s worth being aware of pain because then you can try to find the cause and fix it, but this is optimizing for my brain and not yours.
...There are definitely days when I ignore physical states because I’m busy at work. This doesn’t help in the long run; it ends with me being really cranky and not knowing why and it being obvious from outside view that it’s because I forgot to drink water. It’s more efficient to be paying attention to thirst the whole time, even though then I have to suffer and be thirsty a bit when I’m stuck in my patient’s room.
I have no idea what the causes of most of these pains are, they’re very mild, and they tend to go away on their own once I stop paying attention to them.
I do seem to have frequent trouble with pain behind my ears that probably comes from my eyeglasses, though. Having my eyeglasses adjusted doesn’t seem to help very much, and I can’t focus more than six inches away from my face without them, so I just live with it and take over-the-counter painkillers when it gets bad.
Who knows how much of your behavior is indeliberate responses to such inexperienced pain, rationalized with reasons that are more available to your consciousness?
I’m leery of developing increased physical awareness. At any given moment, if I care to notice it, I start feeling mild pain in random parts of my body. As long as I’m not paying attention to the pain, it’s not there, but when I start to think about how, say, my legs are feeling, I notice that there’s a bit of pain there that wasn’t there before because I wasn’t thinking about it. So I often try to suppress physical awareness by focusing on absorbing activities such as reading, etc. Am I wrong in expecting that increasing my physical awareness would also mean increasing my awareness of annoying (mild) pains that I’d prefer to just shut out completely?
This was certainly my experience. That said, my experience was also that I stopped experiencing such mild pains as something aversive. I suspect the two were related.
If there’s pain there’s probably a reason for that pain. Simply associating all pain is no good long term strategy.
If you become aware that your legs are in pain it usually results in changing the position of your legs. Your body might also increase the blood flow in the tissue on which you focus your attention.
There are a number of meditation exercises that have components where you try to focus on a painful sensation and stop experiencing it as aversive. I don’t know if this would counteract the negative affect of noticing pain. Of course, there might be actual reasons why you’re in pain; posture, not exercising enough, not stretching, exercising too much, etc etc. My brain wants to say that it’s worth being aware of pain because then you can try to find the cause and fix it, but this is optimizing for my brain and not yours.
...There are definitely days when I ignore physical states because I’m busy at work. This doesn’t help in the long run; it ends with me being really cranky and not knowing why and it being obvious from outside view that it’s because I forgot to drink water. It’s more efficient to be paying attention to thirst the whole time, even though then I have to suffer and be thirsty a bit when I’m stuck in my patient’s room.
I have no idea what the causes of most of these pains are, they’re very mild, and they tend to go away on their own once I stop paying attention to them.
I do seem to have frequent trouble with pain behind my ears that probably comes from my eyeglasses, though. Having my eyeglasses adjusted doesn’t seem to help very much, and I can’t focus more than six inches away from my face without them, so I just live with it and take over-the-counter painkillers when it gets bad.
Who knows how much of your behavior is indeliberate responses to such inexperienced pain, rationalized with reasons that are more available to your consciousness?