What if the thing you reach for when you’re exhausted isn’t actually what helps you recover? After an intense day, it’s natural to want to collapse on the couch, scroll your phone, or zone out in front of the TV. But there’s an important distinction between rest and recovery. Rest helps you stop; active recovery helps replenish you. Drawing on lessons from peak-performance science, this post explores how simple activities like walking, exercise, time in nature, creativity, socializing, or other forms of meaningful engagement can help your brain and nervous system recalibrate after a demanding day. The goal isn’t perfect balance — it’s finding ways to offset the particular demands of your everyday life.

On the path to healing chronic pain, sometimes our brains will mess with us. In fact, it’s a feature of our biology — when our situations change for the better, our brains have the habit of redefining what it classifies as a "problem." We instinctively move the goalposts, which can mask that things are, in fact, improving. The same applies for solving chronic pain & other symptoms, and so part of recovery will be to overcome your brain's built-in biases (we all have 'em!) that work to keep our perceptions basically the same over time. Read on to learn more about this feature of our brains and how to help your perception shift in the right direction.

One of my favorite things about working with Pain Reprocessing Therapy clients is how quickly improvement can happen. Clients routinely share real shifts in their pain & symptoms in the first few sessions. Then…the work begins. Ups & downs with symptoms happen. Flares & setbacks come along. Or the pain gets better but just hasn't quite gone away yet. Cue the frustration! When we hit that frustration, it most definitely doesn’t feel good, and many of us stop there because we really don’t like that feeling. Read on here — you’re about to learn why feeling frustrated is the exact thing we need to teach our nervous systems something new.