The Ego Mind and Injury Recovery
The body is an amazing structure that has the ability to heal and regenerate tissues from a majority of injuries and illnesses. From a physiological perspective, it estimated that majority of human tissues will regenerate and heal within a 12-week period of first being damaged. Everyone heals at different rates however so it is difficult to say exactly how long it will take for your individual injury to recover.
It is estimated that on average, hard tissues such as bones, will regenerate between 6-8 weeks and soft tissues, such as ligaments and tendons, between 8-12 weeks. Obviously, the extent of the damage will highly influence how long it takes your body to recover. Your perception, attitude and commitment to your recovery plays an important role in your individual healing process and symptoms being experienced. This is controlled by the “ego mind”.
When we get injured, the ego mind associates what happened in the first place as a negative traumatic experience and will tell you to avoid doing what you did in order to protect you from going through the same experience. It does this so we can learn what is good for us and what is not. Unfortunately, sometimes this protection from the ego mind can limit us when physiologically there could be no abnormalities present. This makes essentially safe movements and activities as perceived threats.
How physical practitioners retrain the mind is by safely and gradually re-introducing movements and activities in order for the ego mind to once again learn what is safe for you. We face difficulties when the ego mind has been trained and conditioned to such a high level of protection that nearly everything we say or suggest is, distorted and generalised to be a threat.
Here are my top 3 tips on how you as an individual can help retrain the ego mind:
1) Become “Accepting” of the position you are in.
it is easy to continue to threat on past experiences and blame others. However, it is only when you yourself become accepting of your current position that you are able to move forward and open the ego mind to new possibilities.
Accepting does not mean forgetting, however acknowledging that the body needs to work in a different way in order to return to functionality.
2) Be willing to do things outside of your current comfort zone.
We tend to stick to what we are most comfortable with. By doing such we trained our ego mind to what should be in our own unique portfolio of comfort. Unfortunately, by continuing to do the things within this comfort zone limits our exposure to new or required things to best serve us, making it is hard to elicit any changes or learn new things.
Be willing to venture out of your current comfort zone and being introduced and be exposed to new things that will benefit your current situation and build on your portfolio of comfort.
Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t.
3) Be 100% truthful to yourself as well as others.
As kids we would learn quickly that by lying we can get away with things and avoid getting into trouble. As adults we continue this behaviour to avoid consequences no matter what the circumstances may be. When you lie about your situation to your health care team, it is your ego mind doing such to keep yourself in your comfort zone and avoiding the potential consequences you feel will happen by telling the truth.
Your treating team wants to know the absolute truth when it comes to your care. If they know exactly what has happened, or what you have been doing, they are in the best position to provide treatment suggestions and recommendations.
Be truthful to yourself and have open and honest communication with your practitioners in order to get the most out of every consultation.
