September 22, 2024
Learning from Pain-what pain has to teach us on and off the court.
Pain is a complex topic that has much to teach us if we are willing to listen. Avoidance of pain causes serious life consequences. Pain is a requirement for growth on and off the basketball court. Pain can also be a result of damage or injury. It is both good and terrible. It is both simple as well as highly confusing and mysterious.
What can you learn about your own relationship with pain? How can your insights on pain make you a better player and a better person? Pursuing pain is not what healthy people do but being a person of wisdom requires the ability to navigate pain in ways that bring strength, dignity, and inner grace.
What is Pain?
This may seem like a straightforward question. For many years, pain was described as a physical sensation that we experience in our bodies resulting from injury or trauma to the body. Researchers have found that pain isn’t quite so easy to explain. One reason is that pain varies for every individual and registers in the brain uniquely. Someone can experience the exact same physical trauma but experience pain very differently. Some may not even have a physical wound but be in excruciating pain resulting from emotional or generational trauma.
The word pain is a compilation of the French word meaning the agony of Christ and intense suffering, and the Latin word meaning penalty.
For those practicing medicine, pain is always a mystifying topic. One person with a significantly damaged knee rates low levels of pain, whereas another person with only a slightly damaged knee rates their pain as life debilitating and barely tolerable.
How Pain is Accessed?
The common descriptions of pain include sharp, dull, aching, throbbing, stabbing, burning, and shooting.
Pain is often assessed by a numeric rating scale from 0 to 10.
Pain is the result of emotional, spiritual, relational, mental, behavioral, and generational factors or situations. The Mayo Clinic reports higher levels of heart attack with relational bitterness, higher levels of pancreatic cancer in people with fear and anxiety, and many other diseases connected to genetic trauma and history.
Emotional pain registers in the body as a physical pain. For example, those who experience a deep relational hurt or insult often describe the pain like a “knife to the heart.” The body registers a deep physical pain as if it were a physical wound.
Why Treating Pain Matters
Pain is a gift from the body warning us that something is wrong. Disregard of pain can lead to greater injury and overfocus on pain can lead to excessive self-protection and inertia. Pain can cause us to be afraid. For example, researchers have found that rebounding from traumatic injury is important to bring the mind and spirit back to healing. Surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm during a shark attack, focused on how to get back in the water. She resolved not to let the pain of her traumatic experience stop her from surfing.
Pain Resistance is Developed
Research on pain tolerance has found those who play contact sports report a higher pain tolerance than those who play non-contact sports. Higher pain tolerance is both good and bad. It allows athletes to achieve more but can result in greater and longer-lasting injury. Interestingly, some arthroscopic surgeons have discovered anecdotally that ranchers report very high pain tolerance for arthritis. This raises interest in understanding how certain athletes and professions have learned to overcome pain.
When Pain Becomes Toxic
Whether physical or emotional, if we don’t listen carefully to what pain is telling us, we can begin to overcompensate in other areas and bring even more pain into our lives. For example, if we base our self-worth on what we do rather than our own innate worth, our mental attention may manifest in comparison, judgment, pressure, workaholism, and sacrifice of meaning for the sake of ambition. Traumatic pain triggers from past emotional or generational trauma can compel overeating, over-spending, addictive behavior, physical, mental, emotional self-harm, or extreme pleasure seeking that can result in greater self-loathing and shame.
Take time to consider how you manage pain.
Can you recognize when you are in pain? Do you tend to clean, escape, criticize, seek pleasure, or sleep when you are in pain? In what areas do you tend to push too hard, or give up too quickly? Do you have chronic pain and if so, what might your body be trying to tell you? Who are your mentors and how are you learning to use pain as a tool for healing?
What is pain trying to teach you?
About NBC Basketball
NBC Basketball started in 1971 and has grown to become one of the largest, overnight camp programs in the world. Camps focus on building skill, mindset, and intrinsic values such as resilience, grit, confidence, commitment and vision. For more information about NBC Basketball visit www.nbccamps.com