Lifestyle Factors and Chronic Pain: Looking Beyond the Symptoms

Why Lifestyle Factors Matter

Today’s medicine is becoming more lifestyle-focused because how we live affects our overall well-being and health. Traditional medicine plays an important role in diagnosing illnesses, treating symptoms, and avoiding complications. Depending on the condition, care usually includes the doctor prescribing medications, procedures, counseling, physical therapy, surgery, or further treatments.

Lifestyle medicine adds another layer, focusing on how lifestyle factors and daily habits influence our health. Lifestyle medicine looks at how diet, exercise, mood, social support, and avoiding harmful substances can affect how your body functions and how well these things can help a person manage a chronic condition.

When you live with chronic pain, looking beyond the symptom does not mean ignoring medical treatment. It means also considering lifestyle factors, including emotional, environmental, and physical factors that may be influencing your health.

Factors That May Contribute to Imbalance

Lifestyle medicine and holistic health share many common principles. Both recognize that the body, mind, emotions, social relationships, and even spiritual well-being all influence health. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, they encourage looking at the underlying factors that may be contributing to illness.

Let’s look at some of the factors that can create these imbalances.

Immune System and Chronic Pain

Our immune system protects our body from infections, injuries, and other threats. It works closely with the nervous system and the gut microbiome. The majority of our immune system is found within the digestive tract. This is where the immune cells interact with the microorganisms that reside in the gut. Diet, medications, stress, sleep, and other lifestyle factors may influence this environment.

The brain and spinal cord also contain specialized immune cells called microglia. When these types of cells become activated, they help repair the central nervous system. When inflammatory signals to these cells become prolonged or not properly regulated, it may contribute to neuroinflammation and increased sensitivity to pain.

Chronic Inflammation

Inflammation is part of your body’s natural defense and healing response. Acute inflammation is usually temporary and may cause heat, redness, swelling, or tenderness after an injury or infection.

Chronic inflammation works differently. It can continue for months or even years and may be influenced by certain health conditions, infections, smoking, poor sleep, prolonged stress, physical inactivity, excess body fat, and other factors.

Chronic and prolonged inflammatory activity sometimes may damage healthy tissues and contribute to oxidative stress. In some chronic pain conditions, inflammatory signaling in the peripheral and central nervous systems may also increase nerve sensitivity and help sustain pain.

Symptoms of Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation, like many other concerns, doesn’t have specific or obvious symptoms because symptoms can vary depending on their cause. The symptoms could be associated with fatigue, digestive problems, poor sleep quality, joint or muscle pain, imbalances in blood sugar, depression or anxiety, chronic pain, or many other symptoms. Since many of these symptoms have various causes, it’s always best to consult with your healthcare provider.

There are also many diseases associated with chronic inflammation, like obesity, type 2 diabetes, blood sugar imbalances, Fibromyalgia, CRPS, and Chronic Fatigue. Accumulating evidence suggests that inflammation in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and central nervous system (CNS) is the major factor in the pathogenesis of chronic pain. (NIH – 2023). It has also been found that those with higher inflammation are more likely to experience bone loss and osteoporosis

Supporting Better Balance

The good news is that many of these lifestyle factors are in your control. When managing chronic pain, these factors may not fully eliminate your pain, but they can support your overall health, improve your body’s resilience, and help you feel better over time.

Other Potential Contributing Factors

Another area that may be worth exploring is the role that some infections, particularly viral infections, may play in triggering or contributing to chronic pain in certain individuals. Researchers continue to study whether these infections may act as one of several contributing factors rather than being the sole cause of chronic pain.

Fibromyalgia, for some people, has been thought to be triggered by an event that causes significant physical or emotional stress. This type of stress can include a serious injury, such as one sustained in a car accident, or an infection, such as Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) or Lyme disease.

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common infection caused by a type of herpes virus and is well known for its importance during pregnancy and in people with weakened immune systems. Researchers continue to study whether these types of viruses from the broader herpesvirus family may play a role in some chronic inflammatory conditions.

Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) and Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV), the virus that causes shingles, are members of the herpesvirus family. Before I developed CRPS, I experienced shingles, which naturally made me wonder whether there could have been a connection. While that doesn’t prove shingles caused my CRPS, it reinforced my interest in learning more about the role infections may play in chronic pain.

It’s important to remember that researchers continue to investigate whether certain viral infections may contribute to ongoing inflammation or nervous system sensitization in some individuals. In her book Putting Out the Fire, Katinka van der Merwe discusses the role she believes infections and other underlying factors may play in chronic pain and CRPS.

Having a history of one of these infections does not mean it is causing your chronic pain. However, if you have questions about your medical history or persistent symptoms, it may be worth discussing them with your healthcare provider. Researchers continue to investigate whether infections may contribute to inflammation or nervous system sensitization in some individuals, making them one possible piece of a much larger puzzle.

My Perspective

Focusing on building and improving overall health helped me manage my chronic pain from CRPS. I began looking at several lifestyle factors, including how sleep, diet, movement, stress, emotions, and how my nervous system responded to stimuli were affecting the way I felt. Creating healthier habits did not provide an instant cure, but I did find that over time, these changes greatly helped me feel more in control of my care, reduced my overall pain level, and definitely helped me feel better.

Key Takeaways

• Chronic pain is influenced by your physical, emotional, social, and lifestyle factors.
• A combination of conventional medicine and lifestyle factors can and often do work together.
• Inflammation and nervous system sensitization may contribute to chronic pain.
• Healthy habits may improve your function and quality of life, even if your pain doesn’t completely disappear.

If you want to learn more about managing and living with chronic pain, visit our Living with Chronic Pain Learning Center.