Since back pain can affect so many different aspects of your life, it is important to find ways of managing the pain yourself.
Treatments and products can be of great help, but it is also important to think about what you can do to take control of back pain. Small things that you can do on a daily basis that will make it easier to cope with back pain. In this section you can find tips on:
- Staying active
- Pacing yourself
- Prioritising and planning
- Setting realistic goals
- Relaxation techniques
- Exercise
- Pain diaries
- Other resources
Why self help?
The only person that lives with your back pain is yourself. Healthcare professionals and other practitioners can be very helpful in providing treatments and giving information and tips, but these people cannot be on your side 24 hours a day. This is where self-help techniques can play a big role. Many healthcare professionals, practitioners or products can help you with applying self help techniques. The below list contains some techniques that you may want to try.
Staying active
The best way of coping with back pain and preventing the pain from getting worse is staying active. This may sound strange as staying active and moving around when you have back pain may be difficult. However staying active, or perhaps even increasing your levels of activity, prevents your body from de-conditioning. There is no need to start training for a marathon to achieve this, small changes in your daily activities will get you the benefits. Walk to the shops instead of taking the car, go for a swim in the local pool, take a nice long walk in the park, do some stretches when you wak up in the morning. All these simple measures can make a difference to your activity pattern and positively influence your back pain.
Pacing yourself
Back pain often comes and goes; you will have good and bad days. When you are having a good day (or a ‘least bad’ day) you may feel like doing a lot of things from cleaning the house to doing the weekly shopping, from spending some more time at work to tidying up the garden. You may feel pressured to get all this work done before your pain increases. There is a chance you over-do it and this may result in having to take time out to recover from your increased back pain.
To avoid this, you may better off trying to pace yourself. Try to spread your workload over a longer period of time. Chances are that by doing so you can lengthen the times that you can control your pain and have fewer flare-ups.
Prioritising and planning
Be clear about things that you have to do and try to plan them in advance. However at the same time allow for some flexibility because other things can get in the way. If you are clear about your priorities for the day, for the week or for next time period, you can feel much more relaxed once you have achieved them. Planning also links in with pacing; plan your day carefully and try to avoid overdoing it and paying the price.
Set realistic goals
Be realistic what you can achieve and set yourself a goal. You can set goals for the day, for the week or for a longer period of time. If you are not realistic in what you can achieve, you may only get frustrated from not achieving your goals. You may find that when your back pain changes, you have to re-set your goals.
Relaxation techniques
Find ways of relaxing. This may be special relaxation exercises or just finding an activity that you enjoy and allows to relax, such as reading a book, listening to music, meetings friends, meditation, walking, etc. Everyone needs to unwind so once in a while and do not let back pain get in the way of your relaxing moments.
Exercise
Although some people with back pain may fear exercise, exercise is actually an important element of managing back pain. Regular exercise can decrease pain and discomfort, strengthen muscles and make you feel good. Find some exercise that you enjoy and that you feel are beneficial to you. Your health provider or exercise professional may be able to advise you on what exercise you can try. You can also visit our section on ‘Exercise’ or order a copy of our ‘Active Backcare’ booklet. Remember that you may feel some discomfort after you have been exercising muscles that are unfit or under-used. This should disappear within a day or two and you should feel less discomfort once your body gets used to the exercises.
Pain diary
Back pain often comes and goes and you will have periods of fairly minimum pain and periods of flare-ups. If you maintain a pain dairy in which you keep a record of when you experience pain and what you have been doing, you may start to see a pattern. This will allow you identify activities or circumstances that result in increased pain and you can then find other ways of doing these activities to avoid the pain increases.
Other resources
In addition to the above tips and techniques, you may want to contact your local self-help group, consult with a healthcare professionals or try one of the many products and services available to people with back pain. You can find more information on these methods of finding help by using the menu at the top left of this page.