Dynamic safety barrier principle credit: Professor Lorimer Mosely and Noi Group 'Fit for Purpose'

Just take a quiet moment to image yourself standing at the edge of cliff behind a safety barrier. You can see ships in the distance and if you look down you see gulls diving into the sea. You have your usual bodily tension, but you are fit, healthy and managing life stresses well. You feel no physical pain. Behind the barrier is pain-free movement, if you push past the barrier too quickly, hello acute injury, or slowly sneak around the barrier over time, hello chronic lower back pain or Fibromyalgia, you’ll experience physical pain. The safety barrier is dynamic and moves away from the cliff edge meaning that you experience pain more quickly with less effort than you did before. This is known as your hypersensitivity set point.

In the case of an acute injury a protective mechanism, known as peripheral sensitisation, protects the injury by making the area sensitive so that it can heal. As the tissue injury heals over time the safety barrier moves back to the edge of the cliff and easeful movement resumes. Individuals have different starting positions of their safety barrier, your very own hypersensitivity set point, some are on the cliff edge, others sit a bit back and others are far away from the cliff edge. This is usually explained by the person as a having a high or low pain-threshold and is set by past, present and predicted biopsychosocial challenges and threats. Two individuals, one has their safety barrier by the cliff edge and the other has it placed further back. They both encounter the same experience/activity but the one with the barrier placed furthest away from the cliff will experience a stronger pain response quicker.

Remember that with persistent pain the safety barrier moves further away from the cliff edge due to general biopsychosocial threats to the human, not specific threats to a body part.

Here's the big question, how can we make the bodymind (yes that’s right you cannot separate the bodymind they are explicably intertwined) ‘fit for purpose’?

First, we need to understand chronic pain, the up-to-date research and contemporary theories of neural and bio plasticity (yes that’s right your brain and body are constantly changing depending on the demands that you place on your bodymind). You are adaptable!

Second, learning mind strategies like somatic tracking, positive affirmations, messages of safety and by piling on things that make your bodymind feel safe rather than under threat, safety-in-me (SIMs) versus danger-in-me (DIMs).

Third, move. Moving within a comfortable range so that your bodymind feels safe and gradually, kindly challenge your movement protentional.

I am a Pain Reprocessing therapist and have attended pain neuroscience lectures with Professor Lorimer Moseley who partners with NOI group and Flippin’ Pain. Both compatible approaches are taught in ‘Move with Eases’ online chronic pain recovery course
https://www.movewithease.org.uk/chron...

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