Today's short and sweet podcast that's about flipping a pretty standard practice that many people in pain do on their own and/or are directed by their healthcare providers to do, Tracking Symptoms, to one that's one that will develop increased health + wellbeing. There's research that shows that tracking symptoms has a dark side, increasing distress, anxiety and symptoms. And from my expereince, tracking can hamper healing and brain rewiring. In the episode notes I'll link to articles and studies as well as the image of The Comfort Scale. But I want to encourage you sink into your creativity and develop a way of tracking comfort that feels best to you. As with anything in mindbody practices, letting yourself be in process and explore with curiosity.
Today's short and sweet podcast that's about flipping a pretty standard practice that many people in pain do on their own and/or are directed by their healthcare providers to do, Tracking Symptoms, to one that's one that will develop increased health + wellbeing.
There's research that shows that tracking symptoms has a dark side, increasing distress, anxiety and symptoms. And from my expereince, tracking can hamper healing and brain rewiring.
In the episode notes I'll link to articles and studies as well as the image of The Comfort Scale. But I want to encourage you sink into your creativity and develop a way of tracking comfort that feels best to you. As with anything in mindbody practices, letting yourself be in process and explore with curiosity.
Articles -
https://www.wired.com/story/why-tracking-your-symptoms-can-make-you-feel-worse/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_overcome_your_brains_fixation_on_bad_things
https://medicalfuturist.com/the-dark-side-of-health-trackers/
Roger's version of The Comfort Scale
https://hypnosishealthinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Comfort-Scale.pdf
If you make your own version, I would love love love to see it!
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] Hello, feelers and healers. It is Deb with the Curiosity Cure podcast. It is so nice to be here with you today. Today's episode is going to be about the comfort scale, but first I want to reflect on my reaction to podcast number 37 on fear of rejection because I almost deleted it. I was feeling a lot of shame about my emotional expression on the recording, but I decided before I responded to something just out of a reaction from an uncomfortable emotion, I should listen to it again from a resourced and neutral place.
[00:01:40] I also asked a trusted friend who doesn't have any stakes in whether or not that podcast was aired, to listen to it and share with me her thoughts. When I re listened to it while I was driving so as to mirror what it might feel like to listen to it as you, right? I'm often listening to podcasts while driving or doing dishes or taking a walk.
[00:02:06] I'm rarely sitting at my computer completely focused on it. What I noticed happening was a lot of love and empathy for myself arose. I could really feel and understand what I was trying to convey. Yes, it was very me, which often involves like circuitous in style looping stories, teaching and insights. I used to hate how I told stories thinking that I was rambling or unclear.
[00:02:39] And the more that I've shared my voice and myself in this podcast and others, the more I like how I speak. And what's more important, it's about how impactful the content is, not just talking to hear myself talk, but to evoke, display, or help you understand how pain is not a fixed, unchanging experience that is only caused by damage to the body and only remedied through medical intervention like medication, injections, or surgery.
[00:03:14] It's more complex than that. And while I always recommend going to the doctor, getting things ruled out, taking medication that benefits you, and so on, and introducing a mind body approach to your life, you might be amazed at what is possible to be different for you. So, I just wanted to bring you along on my journey because I hear from so many of you that it feels really amazing to be seen and validated in our human experience.
[00:03:46] And to know that I am just like you. I just have some extra training and understanding of the mind body experience. So, but. I'm still a human being in a human body, living in this world and tending to my own ecosystem as best I can. Today I want to lean into a new concept and practice called the comfort scale.
[00:04:10] If you've had an acute or chronic pain, you might be familiar with the pain scale. It's one of the ways we are taught to measure and track our body's uncomfortable sensations. It has value, but at some point it becomes a liability because of the way the brain uses predictive coding and learns persistent pain.
[00:04:31] I once had a dear client who had a beautifully created journal in which she tracked all of her pain and triggers for years. And I'll just tell you now the end of the story, which is after our work together, she was able to do a lot of things that she had never done before, including doing the Camino de Santiago walk, which is a walk from France or Portugal to Spain. That was something that was inconceivable when we first started working together, even the idea of being able to walk to the store, to the post office, being able to do gardening without pain.
[00:05:14] Those were inconceivable experiences before we worked together. So she had a pain journal and it was beautiful and had lots of complexity and tracking and different colors and different graphs. And the first thing we did together was to stop that practice. If you remember the adage about neuroplasticity and how our brain works, what fires together wires together.
[00:05:41] I'm going to link in the show notes, an article about how tracking your symptoms can make you feel worse. Here's a quote from the article. The body's response can be triggered by negative expectations, says Luana Colluca, a University of Maryland neuroscientist and physician who studies placebo and nocebo effects.
[00:06:04] It's a mechanism of self defense. From an evolutionary point of view, we've developed mechanisms to prevent dangerous situations. In this article Which I highly recommend you read. They go on to describe how expectations inform what you're experiencing. How the brain and the body work together. This cannot be overstated enough.
[00:06:26] Because if it works in one direction, creating or amplifying pain or unpleasant sensations, it mechanistically works in the other direction, creating or amplifying not pain or pleasure. The symptom tracker doesn't just reveal your highs and lows. This is from the article. It produces a state of anxiety and possibly more pain.
[00:06:52] That's because our expectations shape how we feel. About 18 percent of people enrolled in trials of migraine drugs reported side effects from a sugar pill. They didn't know if they were taking the real drug or a fake one. And in a different study, people who were told that their post operative morphine was ending felt a sudden surge in pain.
[00:07:16] And other patients whose morphine drip stopped without a specific warning didn't feel that intense pain surge. So again, expectation and our beliefs shape how we feel. And I believe that our attention is one of the greatest medicinal devices or mechanisms that we have. And I'm deliberately speaking about attention in this manner because I want you to start to think about how your body and your brain already contains the healing stuff inside of you.
[00:07:52] Like a cut that heals on its own without conscious directions from you, quote, unquote, whoever you are. When we learn to cultivate attention your physiological experience will change. There will be healing. Not tracking pain or symptoms is akin to not picking a scab. And I could go on and on more and more about the brain, but I want to make sure to center the comfort scale in today's podcast. So if you want to go down your own rabbit hole about expectation, nocebo, and how tracking symptoms or anything that feels negative, dangerous, or scary can influence your physiology, I will share some links and recommend that you start to get curious about how this shows up for you in your life.
[00:08:46] And even how your family or your community speaks about this. Once we start to tune our ears to these inputs that come into our brain and body, we can start to become empowered and have a great effect on how we feel.
[00:09:05] Deb: The comfort scale is a tool I got in my Integrative Medical Hypnosis Certification with Roger Moore and Tracy Barrett Adams.
[00:09:12] The comfort scale was developed by Dan Cleary and Kelly T. Woods. The main goal in practice is shifting our frame of reference about our own body from one that feels pain to one that feels a spectrum of things, including comfort, pleasure, not pain, which can be a feeling of nothing. The practice is simple.
[00:09:36] Whether you're tracking your comfort on the whole, or specifically around an activity that's felt dangerous, scary, or had negative sensations like sitting, standing, walking, or more, check in with yourself a few times a day, tracking your comfort on a scale of 0 to 10. So on this comfort scale, and I'll include a PDF of it, 10 is feeling pretty great.
[00:10:03] Eight, feeling pretty comfy. Six, feeling okay, four, mild discomfort, two, uncomfortable or zero and help by meaning like help feeling more than uncomfortable. Obviously, it goes from 10 to 8 and 8 to 6, so, you know, you get to decide in your spectrum whether something's an 8 or whether it's really a 7 12 or maybe it's a 9.
[00:10:38] 25473. You really get to decide. There is no definitive correct answer. And now I know for those of you who want to do it right, doing it. is doing it right. So the right answer lives inside of you because it is more of an art to just start to shift your brain's awareness and attention. So I challenge you to notice your comfort when possible.
[00:11:07] As I've spoken about this in the podcast before, we are the ones who are able to change our brain, but we need to do it on purpose. Applying the comfort scale and taking an end of day tally, like an average, can really help you explore the shifts and also learn to get curious and get the information about when discomfort might be arising, because that can be a great opportunity for a pattern interrupt or a deep calming breath or a practice like somatic tracking.
[00:11:43] And then reassessing your comfort, noticing what does it feel like if you shift your attention to the feeling of the cup of tea or coffee in your hand? What might it feel like to wiggle your toes and pay attention to that feeling? What creates a feeling of a relaxing exhale, or that sense of spaciousness in the back of your head.
[00:12:11] And here's another great article about how to overcome your brain's fixation on bad things. So I'll link to that in the show notes. And when I talk about overcoming your brain's fixation on bad things, it's not a denial that bad things happen. It's not toxic positivity, but it's the quality of fixation, tracking, amplification, and catastrophizing that increases suffering, teaches the brain what to pay attention to, and is an essential part of learning.
[00:12:50] Again, what we fire together, wires together. De escalating distress will allow your brain to think better. Plan for the future better, and experience the present moment more accurately. And as I've been saying to many others, especially this week, just as easily as we can feel pain, we can feel pleasure.
[00:13:15] Especially with this new administration and the election, I'm going to be talking more about amplifying pleasure of many kinds as a form of resistance, and also our human birthright. Thank you. We are designed to feel pleasure. Our nerves, skin, and brain all have the immense capacity to transmit good feelings.
[00:13:41] So starting with tracking comfort as a foundational piece, we need to break a mistaken belief that comfort and pleasure are feelings that we have when things are going well, or when all the difficulties or challenges or stressors have been resolved. That mistaken belief only perpetuates a fixing mentality that ironically increases distress, fear, and catastrophizing, which again amplifies pain.
[00:14:14] And maybe not ironically, but paradoxically. I don't know. Pick whichever word resonates with you. Do you love tracking? What kind of comfort tracking will you do? Some people really love to make detailed charts. And if you don't love that, and it's not you, it's not really me either, that's not a problem.
[00:14:38] Just a gentle practice of noticing comfort when it arises. Noticing how a song or food or feeling feels inside you. I've trained myself with this practice that it now comes pretty regularly without prompting. I notice when bright colors seem brighter, when the coffee tastes just right.
[00:15:03] I've been practicing making poached eggs lately and reveling in when the yolkiness of the yolk is, is just right. Like the right kind of yolkiness. I don't even know what the right kind of yolkiness really is, but I am enjoying the process. I have no idea why my brain is all in on poached eggs, but I think it's because I've been making an effort to make nourishing myself feel easy and joyful. And I think poached egg really falls in that Venn diagram for me. It really hits the spot. I want to encourage you to go all in on this. Even notice what arises in your thoughts about the word comfort. Is that a word that resonates for you? When you think of connecting with or adding more comfort to your daily life, Does your mind already drift over to actions that you might want to take?
[00:16:02] I myself am very tactile. So when I was decorating my bedroom, I went in a fuzzy pillow cover buying spree and now have so many soft, luxurious pillows that I can pet and make a pillow fort with and surround myself with whenever I want to dial up the comfort. And even now I can revivify that feeling of petting my very soft pillowcase and I can feel that sensation inside of me.
[00:16:34] What's something that feels good to you already? Whether that's petting an animal, your partner, or yourself in a way that evokes comfort. Remember, comfort has a whole buffet of felt senses that can be physical, emotional, spiritual, political, temporal, relational comfort.
[00:16:57] Get super curious and start to explore. If you had a comfort control room inside of you, what are the ways that you would turn up comfort? What ways feel possible for you right now? As I was writing these notes, I became aware of how comfortable it is to imagine myself speaking these words to you. And just that alone invited my belly to soften, my body to feel more relaxed in this chair, and my anticipating making this recording start to turn up and become more vibrant and alive.
[00:17:38] So on that note, I think it's my cue to ride this wave and record this podcast about using the comfort scale and becoming your own somatic expert. So if you're curious about working with a coach trained in PRT, that's pain reprocessing therapy, integrative medical hypnosis, life coaching, body work, radical embodiment, and has helped many others rewire their physical and emotional pain and distress, please reach out and book a curiosity call and we can talk more about what working together might look like and feel like.
[00:18:14] So stay tuned to more from me, pain coach, Deb. Creator of this podcast, The Curiosity Cure. Thank you.