Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

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.

> there is an interesting story around chronic pain actually being psychological

I think this is an incorrect oversimplification.

I had a pretty bad accident a year ago and am still dealing with physical therapy and recovery from it. I have spent a lot of last year traveling the land of pain.

It's not that pain (chronic or not) is psychological. It's more that our pyschological state modulates how we experience pain.

If you hit your thumb with a hammer, the pain you feel is absolutely not psychosomatic and entirely in your head. There are real nerves in your hand sending your brain real pain signals.

But if you happen to do that on a day that you're really stressed out, it will hurt worse. And if days after the accident you are still hurting and you find your inner monologue saying things like "See, you hit your thumb because you're such a stupid clutz." then you will experience that pain with greater intensity and for longer than if you had a more positive narrative around the injury.