“Anticipatory” Pain
I was just in a discussion about chronic illness, with my daughter…she mentioned, “anticipatory pain.”
I think that is when you are expecting pain…and the expectation affects you. May it’s an independent driver.
Definition from an article:
“Because you believe that you are going to hurt, you can actually activate the physiological pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt. This is called anticipatory pain; which often leads to suffering.“
Anyone have any comments here? I do think I “know” it’s coming, and I bring it faster or make it worse.
Article: https://recoveryview.com/article/anticipatory-pain-can-lead-to-suffering/
In general it is believed that anticipatory pain can deepen the pain experience. Here is a nice article that discusses pain anticipation (this article calls it rumination other authors call it different things) from 2018.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-01😧644-y
I found several articles about this phenomenon including ways using CBT to lessen the anticipation and thus the pain. If interested perhaps you will want to look in Google Scholar and talk to a psychiatrist or therapist about CBT therapy. .
I am a big believe in that theory,
. When we anticipate pain, we experience stress, which makes the muscles contract, causes blood pressure to rise and does all kinds of things. Have you ever tried meditation? Even a few minutes a day can change the body's reaction to stress. Here is a video about guided meditation that might interest you: https://rheumatoidarthritis.net/video/guided-meditation. You can also get meditation aps for your phone. I hope this helps and that you can find ways to counter that anticipation. Your daughter sounds like a wise woman. Best wishes. - Lori (Team Member) 
Hi
. I am about to be a little contrarian. While anticipatory pain can impact a person in the ways described, it can also cut the other way. The body and, in particular, the brain will often find a way to protect a person. Sometimes in anticipation of pain neural networks will react to mediate the impact of the anticipation of pain (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5390728/). That said, an interesting question is whether the calming activities such as mentioned by and might help activate these neural networks. That would be an interesting experiment. I should also mention that the impact of chronic pain may throw a wrench into all of this, as there is a growing body of research finding that chronic pain actually alters neuropathic responses (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4530716/). In some ways chronic pain puts the anticipatory pain response in the permanent on position.. Figuring out how to mediate this reaction may be the an important question for those with chronic pain. Best, Richard (RheumatoidArthritis.net Team)
