Playing with Pain - How to Rebuild Confidence in Movement After Persistent Pain
Persistent pain isn’t just about physical damage - it’s about patterns. The way your body and brain respond to certain activities can become hardwired over time. But the good news is that those patterns can be disrupted.
In this follow-up post, we’ll dive into how pain associations form, why your brain predicts pain even when there’s no injury, and what tools you can use to safely challenge those predictions and rebuild your confidence in movement.
Pain Is a Prediction, Not Just a Reaction
Your brain is constantly trying to predict what’s going to happen. That’s how it keeps you safe. But when you’ve had multiple painful experiences with a movement—like running or bending—your brain may start flagging that activity as dangerous… before you even begin.
This concept is supported by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who explains:
“Your brain predicts almost everything you do.” Read more here from one of our favorite author/neuroscientists, Lisa Feldman Barrett PhD
How to Break the Cycle: Curiosity + Courage
You don’t break the pain cycle by blindly pushing through pain.
You break it by safely experimenting - using curiosity and courage as tools:
Curiosity = the willingness to try a new approach
Courage = the strength to do something that feels scary
For example, if a standing toe touch has always been a triggering movement, you can experiment by:
reaching towards your toes while breathing out
trying a seated toe touch
5 minutes on the bike or treadmill beforehand to get the heart rate up
a quick core warmup - front planks, side planks, beast planks, crawling, etc
going slowly
Permission to Try Again
If you’ve stopped biking, lifting, running, or even walking your dog because of pain, we want to help you get back there. Not by fixing you but by helping you explore, test, and build new evidence for you to trust your body again.
Sometimes, the most healing thing a clinician can offer is permission. To try, explore, to play with pain - within a safe environment.
Compass > Roadmap
There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for persistent pain. You don’t need a perfect program you need a compass that points you in the right direction.
The journey through persistent pain isn’t about “fixing” your body, it’s about learning to trust your body again.The path will include detours, slowdowns, and unexpected wins. That’s normal. That’s human. And if we stay flexible and committed to experimenting, we move forward.
You don’t need to do this alone. At Back Bay Health, we help active people regain confidence in their bodies and rediscover movement in ways that feel safe and empowering.
