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NonDrug Pain Management Ideas: Pace Yourself!

Once you have identified your pain triggers, you can explore the idea of pacing yourself.
By knowing what activities/ weather patterns/foods/ medications etc. serve to help or hurt your comfort level, you can develop strategies to keep yourself pain free or at reduced pain levels more of the time.

Here are some examples:

If you are just starting an exercise program, try to ease yourself into it.  You can accomplish this by starting slowly and gradually increasing your tolerance to an exercise activity slowly and steadily.  If the activity is too painful, it is possible that you've reached your upper limit for that activity, or maybe a different exercise activity is better suited for your health condition. You can also vary your workout
activities if doing the same thing all the time is problematic.

Try to plan your day(s) so that you have a good balance of activity and rest.  Don't try to clean out your whole house in one day, for example.  Break a big activity into several small projects so that you have time to rest in between.  Conversely, if too much inactivity causes your pain level to increase, make sure you allow for yourself to get up and move around every now and again.

Always try to think of alternate ways of doing your everyday activities.  If you have a day that isn't so good and you need to rest a bit more, you can relax a bit knowing that the same things you have planned can be accomplished by putting plan A aside and moving on to
plan B!




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