Cleaning Therapy For Chronic Pain
“Cleaning therapy” is a term I made up — there is no official therapy based on cleaning. It’s a trick I’ve used over the years to help distract me from chronic pain. Cleaning anything boosts your self-esteem.
Self-esteem? But isn’t this column called Dealing With Headaches? Of course it is. Your emotions can greatly affect your pain, including headaches. Anything you can do to build up your self esteem and lower self-defeating thoughts can eventually help with chronic pain.
The Link With Depression
The majority of people who suffer from chronic pain also suffer from clinical depression. Although depression often needs to be treated with medications, they can do their job better when you think positive thoughts about yourself instead of living like The Whiners all the time.
When you clean something, you can see the results immediately. There’s instant gratification for you. You can see immediately that you have made a difference. It’s a subtle form of behaviorial-cognitive therapy. You are, in a sense, reprogramming your internal chatter in order to boost your self-esteem.
Yet Another Study
Just recently, a link has been seen between depression and mold in the home. Just the smell of mold can be depressing, let alone having to live with it all of the time! So getting rid of household mold can boost your self-esteem, which in turn may help the severity of your chronic pain.
Some Tips
When you use cleaning therapy, there are some things to keep in mind. The goal is to make you feel even just the slightest bit better, not to get your living room into Home And Gardens.
Only take on small tasks, especially when you are in pain. Instead of washing all of the dishes (for example), wash one cup. Wash another if you can. That’s still cleaning!
Don’t compare your cleaning efforts with someone else. You just concentrate on your own efforts.
Hope this helps.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
[...] Cleaning is a source of instant self-esteem, because you can see the results of your actions right away. You don;t need to eat off of the floor, just have something to look at that makes you breathe deeply and relax. [...]
October 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
[...] a prospect to get anyone depressed, cleaning can help those with clinical depression in many ways. Cleaning therapy is also good for those with chronic pain who have some mobility. I’m not talking about the scrubbing the house from roof to basement [...]