Recovering from Injury: 3 Helpful Tips On Navigating the Rocky Road
Recovering from an injury can be a complex journey with many contributing factors influencing it. Injuries can take you away from doing the sport or activity you love, playing soccer in the backyard with your kids, going for your sunrise beach walk with your loved one or afternoon stroll with your fury friend. For some it means they are unable to babysit grandchildren on the weekend or be involved in the charity weekend touch game, or simply may interfere with being able to do physical jobs around the house. Irrespective of how big small an injury may be, the impact can be varying for each individual.
The emotions and feelings associated with being unable to move as you would ideally like can often become overwhelming and frustrating. Pain sensations can make us feel emotional and even irritable. So what things can we do help us feel better when experiencing an injury, to help navigate the undulating road of recovery? Here are 3 tips you may find helpful in navigating the rocky road.
The Importance of Social Support
Recent studies have found that a modifiable factor related to positive mental health and psychological outcomes following injury is social support. A 2020 study found that patients with higher perceived social support scores had a lower incidence of depression and higher mental health scores following injury (Carr, Severence, Bell 2020). We can’t underestimate the importance of a friend, training buddy, team mate or coach in helping us feel supported when we are out of action from our beloved sport or activity for weeks or sometimes months at a time. Modifying your usual exercise regime may be necessary for a short period whilst you recover. Catching up with friends outside of your regular exercise class, walking group or soccer game and asking for support and company doing another activity that won’t aggravate your injury may be helpful in remaining motivated while you recover. Our classes at Back to Bounce are designed to provide our community with support while they are navigating their recovery. If you are interested in attending with other like-minded people on a similar journey, check out our range of classes.
Resiliency
Similarly, in analysing the relationship between pre-injury resiliency scores and quality of life following an injury, researchers found that patients with high resiliency scores were more likely to follow a favourable post injury psychological trajectory (Zarzaur, Bell, Zanskas 2017). Resilience theory outlines that resiliency is the ability of someone who undergoes psychological or physical injury to withstand or overcome the negative effects of injury. Injuries in themselves present a challenge, and in doing so, can act as a helpful tool in helping us build our resiliency. They challenge us and often strengthen us; if you look at any Olympic athlete or sporting star, sporting success very rarely comes without a host of previous injuries. So how do we become more resilient? This may be a topic of another more extensive blog but there are many podcasts and great books that provide helpful strategies and tools in developing our resiliency to face challenges. Brendon Burchard has a great vlog which explores how recognising that frustrations, challenges, hardships are part of being human and the importance of being empathetic toward ourselves when we feel emotional pain and difficulty. He then recommends three strategies to help build resilience.
“You know, resilience always begins with acknowledgement of the difficulty. Acknowledgement of the challenge. Acknowledgement of the struggle of life. And acknowledgement of the inevitable hardships.”- Brendon Burchard
For further reading, resources and inspiration about establishing a resilient mindset, see:
Brendon Burchard “How to build resilience in tough times”
Our previous blog post on Nedd Brockmann’s incredible journey
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant
The Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg
Education
Understanding what factors can influence your pain or dysfunction can provide you with a sense of empowerment when you are feeling overwhelmed with pain. Factors such as emotional stress, anxiety, poor diet, poor sleep and nervous system dysregulation can impact our experience of pain. When we experience pain and aren’t sure of what may have contributed to it, it can useful to examine the 48-hour period that preceded our pain. Often, we can discover that a bad sleep, stress at work, too little or even too much movement, may have together culminated in an increase in biological inflammation or pain sensations.
Always talk to your healthcare provider, physiotherapist or practitioner guiding your rehabilitation about expected time frames and prognosis for healing. While it may not always be easy to predict the exact time frame (this is impacted by many factors), different injuries have different healing time frames. Tendon injuries are often much slower to recover than muscle and inflammatory pain is treated differently to soft tissue injury, so it is important that you are given a specific diagnosis and information regarding pain and injury management.
Injuries help us appreciate our able, wondrous bodies when they are healthy and well. They can help us soak up the days when we can walk on the beach, play with our kids and mow the lawn. Maybe in the early days of injury recovery we don’t surf and stand up like our fellow surfing buddies, but maybe just getting out in the water and paddling on our board is enough for now. Perhaps you may be unable to do your usual 10km run, but a walk for now can still be enjoyable and be enough to get you moving. Whatever your road to recovery looks like, know that the journey is yours and yours only. The road is not always linear. It’s a journey of ups and downs, frustrations, paired with steps forward and a few tumbles backward, often in the same week. It is furthermore impacted by compounding factors such as sleep, emotional and also physical stress. Using strategies of engaging social support, employing resiliency mindset tools and being informed about your injury and what factors may inhibit recovery or impact pain, can help us in traversing the road of recovery. Remember to always seek the guidance of your healthcare professional if you are unclear on what may be contributing to your pain or feel you need further clarification; we are always here to help.
References:
Bryant RA, Nickerson A, Creamer M, O’Donnell M, Forbes D, Galatzer-Levy I, McFarlane AC, Silove D. Trajectory of post-traumatic stress following traumatic injury: 6-year follow-up. Br J Psychiatry. 2015;206(5):417–23. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
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Zarzaur BL, Bell TM, Zanskas SA. Resiliency and quality of life trajectories after injury. J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 2017 May;82(5):939-945. doi: 10.1097/TA.0000000000001415. PMID: 28230626; PMCID: PMC5753399.
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