Pressure. Pain. Relief.
About four weeks ago, my back pain returned for real. With an incredibly busy work schedule, I did everything I could to push through it. It got worse. Then two weeks ago I spent 36 hours unable to get out of bed because of excruciating back spasms that were triggered by the slightest movement. It had gotten so bad that I needed my wife’s help to simply turn over in bed.
Laying there in bed, largely immobile, I did something I should have done many years ago. I listened to Dr. John Sarno’s bestselling book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection.
The mind-body connection is a pillar of eastern medicine but until recently has been starkly absent from western medicine. When Dr. Sarno – an NYU medical school professor and chronic pain specialist – hypothesized decades ago that most back pain has psychological origins, he was largely ostracized from the medical establishment, although now his ideas are becoming much more widely accepted.
The basic concept is relatively simple. Our human brains are evolved to make us highly social and “responsible” animals. As such, our brains are wired to often suppress feelings of fear and anger – especially when those are directed at people we love, the job we rely on, etc. When those feelings intensify and threaten to leave our unconscious, the brain works with the nervous system to create pain in the body by restricting oxygen to certain muscle groups. It’s the brain’s perverse way of trying to help you continue to avoid focusing on normal - yet scary - emotions. When you become fixated on the physical pain, you can continue to suppress the emotions.
The “treatment” of the pain, therefore, is 100% psychological. You have to show the brain that the pain is not working to distract you. In response to the pain, you have to dive deeper into the emotions you’ve been avoiding. Dr. Sarno suggests making a list of all the pressures you feel in your life – both external pressures (stressors at work, deadlines, fraught relationships, etc.) and internal, self-imposed pressures (“I want to be liked by everyone,” or “I feel like I absolutely cannot fail,” etc.). The exercise forced me to face bigger pressures that I had felt rising in my life, and to recognize smaller pressures that I had failed to even acknowledge – normal, simple things like, “I feel pressure to not be angry at my child,” even in a moment when she’s driving me nuts.
If you asked me a month ago, I would have told you sincerely that my life didn’t have a lot of pressure. Now I was lying in bed, making a list of pressures that - without a whole lot of effort - was 25 items long.
I was completely humbled. Whatever autopilot I had been on felt utterly disabled. And I was doing something so simple yet elusive in my day to day life. I was allowing myself to feel the feelings I had been having. I didn’t need to do anything about them. I didn’t need to “fix” the issues that were creating the feelings. I just needed to give those feelings a home. I needed to show my brain that it was okay to feel scared and angry. And the most amazing thing is: it worked. The pain started subsiding the next day. I journaled every day and kept coming back to the psychological work. Within a few days I was fully functional. I canceled my appointment with an orthopedist and every morning I get out of bed feeling grateful to have a pain-free body.
For someone who makes a living helping leaders deal with their emotions, this has been a stark reminder for me of how much I can still avoid doing that work for myself, especially when things get really busy. In fact, focusing on other people helps me avoid doing that work myself.
Whether or not you have back pain, creating the space to acknowledge the pressures in your life and to feel those feelings is a healing process. The vast majority of leaders we support have the same mechanism for suppressing their feelings: if I can’t fix it, then why dwell on it? But the answer to that is simple: feelings don’t need to be “fixed,” they just need to be felt. When we don’t allow ourselves to feel them, we create greater trouble for ourselves and our bodies. When we give ourselves space to simply feel – through journaling, reflection, meditation, or therapy - we increase our capacity to move forward in life. Feeling won’t make you less “productive.” It’s more likely to do the opposite: release some pressure and allow you to move forward with greater ease.
