Getting To Know Your Pain Scale

Nobody wants to be in pain, right? Even still, so many people put up with pain and just accept it. Pain is not something to be accepted. We must learn to acknowledge it and then work to heal it. 

When it comes to pain, what gets measured gets managed. Basically what we mean by this is that by observing and measuring your pain, you are paying attention to it, you are noticing it and are then on the right path for managing it. 

It’s really common to know you have pain, obviously, but it’s less common to become actually aware of that pain in detail. Think about it. Have you ever found yourself saying “I’ve got pain in my shoulder, neck, headaches and it’s bad”, “bad pain”, “it was bad on Tuesday”, “bad on Wednesday”. Sound familiar? We want to combat this negative and pretty useless use of language. 

You can probably see what we mean already, just from that sentence? It gives no quality information about the pain you are experiencing.

Using a pain scale can really help you, and us understand your pain better. Think about what type of pain it is, what’s the quality of the pain. For example, the pain is sharp in my left shoulder, 6/10. This tells us so much more and gives you information too. Again, what gets measured, gets managed. 

If you know exactly where on your scale you are one day, you can get a flavour for how the pain is growing and developing. 

When you experience consistent pain it can become very easy to just see the big picture without looking into the details. When it is summarised as bad or awful all the time, it is hard to see outside of that. Yet, you probably had some time within that period where it was not as bad as it could’ve been, it was slightly better even. But, because you labelled it as “awful”, you don’t see these parts.

What is a normal level of pain?

Normal levels of pain should be at 0. Normal shouldn’t be any higher than 0. If you are experiencing consistent pain at a higher level, that is an indication that something is not quite 100% within your system. 

There are lots of people that come in and say their pain has been 7/10 this week which is much higher than their “normal” of 5/10. “I’d dream to be at 5/10 pain”. This needs to stop. Again, 5/10 pain is not normal. The reason you might think it is is because you are basing your pain scale on someone else’s model of pain. 

Pain is so subjective in nature, this is why it is important to unwrap and work out where on your scale you are experiencing pain. To reiterate, your normal should be 0/10, no pain. Your 0 is where you are getting on with things, you’re able to move around, to do things. If it’s higher, you’re telling me as a practitioner your pain is worse than normal.

If you do always have back pain, for example, that’s fine, label it as such. Just be sure to use your own personal scale to measure and deeply understand it yourself. It is much easier to explain and get across your pain when you understand it yourself.