An important thing about pain . . .

Your pain nerve ending are like sleeping babies; if your pain pathways are asleep then it is best to use minimal medications or rest or whatever to keep those nerve pathways relaxed and asleep.

If you wake the sleeping baby it is almost impossible to get an upset baby to relax and dose off to sleep again. If you let your pain nerve pathways activate then those signals are no going to relax and stop sending pain messages without a lot of medications, which you should be trying to avoid; long term.

Thus chronic pain is an individual thing, gender, race, type of pain etc etc all affect it. But over time it just wears people down. So people either under-medicate and suffer and this leads to depression or relationship issues. Or people over medicate and then have issues of increased resistance to the medication effects.

Slowly building up some sort of personal attack plan can help people keep focused at what works slightly better or worse. Keep a diary and write down how your pain is actually impacting your lifestyle. This is helpful to your mental health, to your doctor and maybe even to government welfare etc.

Good luck; but some sort of slight exercise is often your best friend, who knows over time you might get strong and fit enough for yoga or Pilates . . .

/ hugz ; )