The clash of conflicting beliefs clashing in your head can leave you with more than just brain pain. A new study that asked volunteers to lift a lightweight box despite being told it wasn’t satisfying work found it can cause physical pain in the neck and back.
A team of researchers from Ohio State University and the University of Michigan in the United States summarized critical feedback on volunteers after saying they performed the lifting task well. Researchers found that the resulting psychological distress put extra pressure on participants’ necks and lower backs.
Although small, this study may have implications for workplace safety, and there is a need to recognize how psychosocial stressors affect it. cognitive dissonancecan harm your physical health.
“Fundamentally, this study was a superficial indication that there was something to this.” explain William Marath, a biomechanics researcher at Ohio State University, said:
Researchers like Maras have come to understand that pain involves a complex interaction between the body and mind. However, it took decades for the ‘biopsychosocial’ model of pain to become widespread after it was first described in the 1980s.
Pain is a complex combination of physical, social, and psychological stressors, and can be manifested by physical strain combined with economic stress and mental ill health. Even the words doctors use to describe back pain shape someone’s expectations of recovery.
“To achieve the goal of treating the patient, not the spine, we need to approach back pain as a disease rather than a purely physical one,” says orthopedic surgeon Gordon Waddell. said. wrote in 1987.
However, most research to date has revolved around the coexistence of chronic pain with depression, anxiety, and catastrophic tendencies (believing the worst will happen or things will never change). Maras and colleagues wanted to understand whether another psychological factor, cognitive dissonance, also plays a role in back and spine pain.
Think of cognitive dissonance as the psychological whiplash that occurs when you try to reconcile multiple seemingly contradictory beliefs. This difficulty can cause distress and make us seek some peace of mind.
Maras et al. designed a series of experiments to see if this psychological discomfort manifests itself physically, just as depression and anxiety exacerbate pain.
“To elucidate the mind-body connection, we decided to look at how people think, and how people get in the way of their thinking, with cognitive dissonance.” explain Maras.
In a lab-based study, 17 volunteers were tasked with moving a lightweight box to precise positions while wearing motion sensors to measure how much strain was placed on the spine and back. .
During the practice run, I was told that I was doing the right movements to protect my back. After that, however, the feedback became increasingly negative, with participants saying that they were not performing the task in a satisfactory manner.
By comparing participants’ discomfort scores to the mechanical load placed on people’s spines, the researchers found that when people were distressed by negative feedback, when they felt competent at the start of the task, and when they felt competent. found a 10-20 percent increase in peak spinal load in comparison.
“This increased load on the spine only occurred under one condition where the load was fairly light.” explain Maras. “You can imagine what this would look like with more complex tasks and higher loads.”
In other words, repetitive psychosocial stressors can place significant strain on the spine and cause pain, but that has not yet been validated.
The load on the lower back also increased, but only slightly. The discomfort score combines physiological measures of stress, such as heart rate variability and blood pressure, with a survey of how the participant feels (such as inspiration or intensity, or embarrassment or distress). bottom.
Keep in mind that back pain is not trivial for those who are able to move freely. that’s the main reason I have been living with a disability for many years all over the world.
A recent analysis of 30 years of data shows that in 2020 Approximately 620 million people worldwide I have back pain and it affects my ability to work, move, travel and take care of myself and others. That number is expected to rise to more than 800 million by 2050, and the growing number of people suffering from back pain reveals the ineffectiveness of conventional treatments, especially the addictive opioid drugs. has become
Pain research is advancing rapidly to understand how chronic pain begins, why it persists, and to find effective ways to reduce it.
Understanding the psychosocial dimensions of pain appears to be of great help, and studies have found that adding psychotherapy to physical therapy may be the key to overcoming chronic low back pain. surely, A more comprehensive model of care include group therapy Reduced opioid use without exacerbating pain.
This latest study adds another dimension to the ever-growing body of research. Only by understanding what aggravates people’s suffering can we hope to alleviate it.
This research Ergonomics.
