I have a pretty severe back injury - double pars fracture and significant spondylolisthesis from an accident (not a car accident). For many years i was in incredible pain, but it just kept going, sometimes getting a lot worse. When this happened I would go get some imaging done to make sure there weren't degenerative changes that needed to be addressed - you should never, ever get back surgery if you don't need it, so I am cautious about it. But I noticed something, all on my own, and that is that it seemed to correlate with periods of intense stress. I still have a ton of stress, but recognizing that actually kind of made a tremendous difference.
I hesitate to add a link to this on the thread, but there is an interesting story around chronic pain actually being psychological and there are now some high quality studies coming out.
https://journals.lww.com/painrpts/Fulltext/2021/09000/Psycho...
I especially hate to link to LessWrong but this is an actually decent thread on the topic:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgBJqPv5ogsX4fLka/the-mind-b...
I didn't know about any of this and had never been exposed to any of it when I drew my conclusions and started to feel less pain. Don't get me wrong, there are still things that will set my back off, but now I probably go actual years without even thinking about it.
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