You might not watch The Simpsons but you will know who Homer is.
Homer the loveable but pretty stupid dad. The thing is nobody wants to be Homer.
Bart? Maybe. He’s the anarchic wee boy all wanted to be.
Lisa? Maybe. Intelligent and cool.
Marge? Again, maybe but definitely not Homer.
Homer is the one out of all the characters that you don’t really want to be even if you are shouting for him
The thing is back pain turns you into Homer.
Back pain does actually make you stupid. It does this in a variety of different ways. But let’s let’s define stupidity first.
Stupidity is the overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information. Back pain does make you do this.
It does it both in your day to day life and also in how you view back pain itself.
Now, this definition isn’t mine, i found it in a really interesting blog post on Farnham Street called “How not to be stupid”.
The guy writing it talks about how there are 7 factors that go into making us stupid.
- Being outside your normal environment or there being changes to your routine.
- Being in the presence of a group
- Being in the presence of an expert or if you, yourself are an expert.
- Doing any task that requires intense focus
- Information overload
- Physical or emotional stress, fatigue
- Being in a hurry.
Not all of these are required for there to be an effect. Any one of them on its own will have an effect.
In the U.S., ad the U.K, all of these are present in hospitals but I just have the figures for the U.S. In the States there are 30,000 deaths a year from car accidents. A big number. But there are between 210,000 and 440,000 deaths in hospitals from errors in treatment!
But what does this have to do with back pain and how does back pain make you stupid?
Back pain causes physical and emotional stress.
It causes fatigue.
It will result in information overload as you seek answers for your back pain. (I appreciate I’m not helping you here).
You might well find yourself hurrying to finish tasks so you can sit down because of the pain.
The pain itself can mean you have to focus really hard to do simple tasks.
So you can see there are all sorts of ways for back pain to make you “stupid”.
It comes into your life and wrecks havoc.
Disrupting sleep.
Causing physical and emotional stress.
Destroying focus and the list goes on,
If you would like to see what a path to being more intelligent would look like all you need to do is reply to this email and we can chat about it.
You can grab a copy of our FREE Back Pain Myths Busted eBook here >>> https://www.performancesportstherapy.net/back-pain-myths-busted-ebook