Jeffrey Besecker:
This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Sensitization. Chronic pain isn't just a physical experience. It's deeply shaped by subconscious and unconscious behavioral patterns that reinforce pain cycles. In this episode of The Light Inside, we explore how primary and secondary behaviors, such as avoidance, emotional suppression, and neural imprinting, contribute to chronic pain by rewiring the nervous system and intensifying stress responses. With guest Butch Phelps, we unravel the intricate connection between emotional regulation, autonomic dysregulation, and the body's pain perception. Join us as we uncover strategies for breaking these deeply ingrained cycles and fostering resilience through somatic and psychological awareness. Tune in to find out how when we return to The Light Inside. When it comes to mobile service providers, many of the big-name networks leave a bad taste in your mouth, with their high-rate plans, extra fees, and hidden costs or expenses. Mint Mobile is a new flavor of mobile network service, sharing all the same reliable features of the big-name brands, yet at a fraction of the cost. I recently made the change to Mint Mobile, and I can't believe the monthly savings, allowing me to put more money in my pocket for all of the things which truly light me up inside. Making the switch to Mint Mobile is easy. Hosted on the T-Mobile 5G network, Mint gives you premium wireless service on the nation's largest 5G network with bulk savings on flexible plan options. Mint offers three, six, and 12-month plans, and the more months you buy, the more you save. Plus, you can keep your current number or change to a new one if you like, and all of your contacts, apps, and photos will seamlessly and effortlessly follow you to your new low-cost Mint provider. Did I mention the best part? You keep more money in your pocket, and with Mint's referral plan, you can rescue more friends from big wireless bills while earning up to $90 for each referral. Visit our affiliate link at www.thelightinside.site forward slash sponsors for additional mobile savings or activate your plan in minutes with the Mint mobile app. Chronic pain is more than a physical condition, it's a complex interaction between our emotional, psychological, and somatic processes. In this episode, we dive deep into the primary and secondary behavioral patterns that reinforce cycles of pain. unraveling the role of hyperkinesis in amplifying these patterns, and how unresolved shadow material contributes to chronic stress. So together with our expert guest, Butch Phelps, we uncover actionable strategies to transform these patterns into opportunities for growth and healing. Butch, I'd like to welcome you to the Light Inside. Thank you for joining us.

Butch Phelps: Thank you for having me, Jeffrey. It's a joy to be here. I'm looking forward to this.

Jeffrey Besecker: Likewise, this should be a really interesting conversation. I don't know that we've really dove too deep into the role that our behavior patterns play in our pain response in recovery. So I think this is an interesting opportunity to look at today.

Butch Phelps: Yes, it's very much so. And that's the whole basis of what I do, is that when you start looking at the relationship between our thought process and how we deal with things mentally, especially when it comes to chronic pain, and how it affects the actual physical side of the body. Many times when I'm working with someone, I'll spend as much time or more on the mental side of the chronic pain than I do on the physical side. And I find that if I do that, the physical side becomes much simpler.

Jeffrey Besecker: So let's give our listeners a little bit of background on you. But as a functional massage therapist, what stimulated your interest in chronic pain and how did that come together with your background?

Butch Phelps: What's interesting about it is when I usually say to people I'm a functional massage therapist, they think of me of doing a massage that they got at a local massage shop. And what I do is far from that. What stimulated me to get into it was my own back pain. And I was 40 years old at the time. I had lost 105 pounds, worked out like a fiend, and literally worked myself into low back pain. And I was trying to discover what was causing that to happen. And I'd go through the typical tests and MRIs and so forth, and nobody could seem to come up with a definitive answer that would solve it. That led me into massage therapy. And then from that point on, it just sort of took off on its own. I realized that I was knowing things about the muscle system that I didn't know how I knew it. I just knew it ahead of time. And as I started to look at the body as a whole picture, I started to realize that by looking at the muscles from an emotional standpoint versus just a physical standpoint, started to open my mind up into how much my mind plays a role in that chronic pain. Secondly, I learned about the stretching in a specific way. What I initially learned was active isolated stretching. And that taught me that what we do most of the time when we're stretching is we're doing more strength training than stretching because we're fighting with the brain. We're not including that brain and the mental aspect of it. And then when I incorporated some of the massage with what I was doing there, I started to relieve that back pain. And I'll be 65 in March, and I haven't had that pain in almost 20 years.

Jeffrey Besecker: Wow.

Butch Phelps: And so then I went back to school and I studied aging sciences. How do we age from 30 to the time we die physically and mentally, which opened my eyes even more to how much the brain plays a role with that.

Jeffrey Besecker: Diving in today, looking at our primary and secondary patterns, we're looking at our behaviors, our habits, are core tendencies and responses. Research shows that avoidance behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms reinforce pain sensitivity through central sensitization. So that's kind of a big theory. Central sensitization is just that elevated response to pain. In that regard, how do you feel primary and secondary behavior patterns influence chronic pain?

Butch Phelps: Okay, it's a great question. So if you're a person that you start dealing with coping mechanisms and you're looking at and you're tied up a person who is on a more negative side, things just don't work out for me. This just doesn't happen for me. You can see it in someone's posture and how they'll stand with rounded shoulders, head forward posture. They may walk with shorter strides. Someone who is sad or depressed may do similar things. someone who's always angry, their bodies are very rigid, maybe they're a type A personality, their bodies are very rigid. Where we missed the mark is that not understanding that everything we think, feel, and do affects the muscle structure of the body. Now, why that's important is that when you increase the tension in the muscle system based on where you are in a mental state, Now you start to put pressure on the nerve, you start to put pressure on the blood system, and you start to change the heart rate. And when you do that, now you can exacerbate that pain in the body itself. And it all started from what state of mind are you in most of the time?

Jeffrey Besecker: Framing that, that brings us in line with that role of hyperkinesis, a state of excessive motor activity often resulting from heightened stress responses. You know, we think about our elevated emotional state or anxiety or just that apprehension about experiencing pain. Escalating it increases muscle tension and pain perception. In that regard, how does hyperkinesis amplify the perception of chronic pain from your perspective?

Butch Phelps: Okay, so when you're looking at hyperkinesis now, so sometimes that can be in the form of a Parkinson's disease and so forth, but for most people, it can come in the form of anxiety, things like ADHD, someone who doesn't like to sit a lot, maybe they're doing stimming or they're constantly moving their leg all the time and so forth. When you're making those movements on a regular basis like that, you're actually tensing the muscle, keeping it tense on a full-time basis. When you look at the fact that the muscles are crossing over joints, Now as they get tight, it starts to pressurize nerves in those systems. They start to pressurize the joints in the body, which is going to set off some pain. And then right off the bat, that person in that state of mind then looks at it and go, oh my gosh, I got this pain. I got this pain. I got to get rid of this pain. And they start to focus in on the pain. Well, the more they focus in on the pain, the tighter the tension in the muscles become, the worse the pain becomes. So it's almost like it's a dog chasing their tail kind of thing. The biggest thing is understanding how to slow that mind down, how to get them to where they start to relax, take better breaths. And as they do that, you can actually get the muscle to relax. What's interesting is when I'm working on someone's body and touching their body, I can feel in their muscles when they let go in their mind. It's just a simple thing.

Jeffrey Besecker: We're looking at, from my perspective, the autonomic ladder in our central nervous system, where that regulation between things like fight, flight, or freeze start to occur, that sense of hyperactivity starts to program itself into our neural response, imprint itself. And as we move through those stages, if we're in one of those heightened phases, then naturally that pain receptor goes up. Naturally, that keeps us activated into the amygdala and that emotional reactivity of the brain.

Butch Phelps: That is true, because the thing is, is that when you get into that fight or flight response, your body has to be prepared to either run or fight. The brain then is in a hyperactivity. You're not going to think about eating. You're not going to think about going to the bathroom or anything else. All you're thinking about is how to get out of that pain. So the pain then becomes that mythical Sabre 2 tiger chasing you 24 hours a day. This can happen to you even when you're sleeping in bed. People try to go to sleep. They're rolling around in bed. They're not sleeping very well. That just exacerbates that problem because as they continue to do that night after night after night, it's continually tensing the muscles 24 hours a day. Many times I'll say to my clients when they come in, once I teach them what to do physically as well as emotionally, do those first thing in the morning and at end of the day. So what you're doing is you're giving yourself a brain break. And by giving yourself a brain break, you're allowing the muscle system to relax, which relaxes the tension and pressure on the nerves coming out of your spine, as well as the disc, the joints, and the nerves throughout the body. When you look at your spine and you've got like 26 vertebrae there, the compression from the muscle system itself, based on how much is going on into the head, now you can change the projection of the pelvis and you can change the movement of the head. You will increase the compression on that spine. So if you're a person who is scared to death of pain, or you're worried about what's going to happen tomorrow, or you just are a pessimistic type of person or sad person, you're increasing the pressure on the spine tremendously, in some cases as much as fourfold, which causes the pain then from the central nervous system to just come throughout the body because it's fighting constantly.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to me to see how that creates a feedback loop in your central nervous system. Looking at, there at the base of your brain, effort-effort neurons controlling where those patterns go. If we're activated through the autonomic ladder, we're going into the amygdala again. We're starting to do those emotional responses, which triggers that cycle of reactivity and that cycle of anxiety, feeding back into the gut response where we're starting to trigger that process of inflammation throughout the system. In that regard, I'm going to tie this in a little here. What role do you feel inflammation plays systemically in heightening that chronic pain or that chronic stress response?

Butch Phelps: Yeah, it's a great question. Systemically, and you understand when you say systemically, that inflammation is inflaming the brain as well. And so that starts to mess with your cognitive functions right off the bat. Now, when you get into the inflammation throughout the body, work it into the joints, it's going to create more stiffness, it's going to create more pain. But for most people, it's going to create more worry, especially as they age, because it's like, OK, here it is. I'm 55. The pain's going to start. They said it was going to start. And they start ruminating on that. And as they ruminate on that, OK, that will increase the inflammation due to the muscle tension. But they'll also start to eat more comfort food. And before you know it, they start to gain weight, which, again, increases the inflammation in the brain and in the joints itself. So it definitely is a loop.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking at rumination, you know, that often triggers us into catastrophizing. We start to imagine worst case scenarios, and we start to predict that heightened sense of pain, or we start to predict how we're going to respond, which also will trigger that anxiety. We, again, tense up and freeze. Catastrophizing redirects attention towards pain, reinforcing a feedback loop of anticipatory anxiety and heightened sensitivity. You know, we're almost starting to confirm in our mind that we're going to have an elevated sense and we start to trigger that reaction to it. So how do you feel cognitive biases like catastrophizing influence chronic pain perception?

Butch Phelps: Oh, yeah, you see that a lot. I'll tell you a small story about that. I'll get people come in and they'll have knee pain, for instance. And right off the bat, the first thing they'll say is they've been on the internet, they read it at so-and-so MD or whatever, and it's like, I must have to have my knee replaced. And I'm like, well, let's see if there's something simpler than that. And so when I start to explain to them exactly how the muscles from a physical standpoint are working, and then what I'll do, I'll say to them, let me show you how the way you walk, for instance, has an effect. And they'll kind of look at me really funny, but the point of that is that if that person is in a catastrophizing state, they're not in a happy state. You know, we're in a happy state. We're standing up straight, posture straight. We're looking like we're just on top of the world. Somebody who's catastrophizing, typically their shoulders are more rounded, their strides are a little bit shorter. their heads a little bit forward. And so what happens then is that it starts, and especially for this particular one I'm thinking about, in the knees, it starts to put more pressure on the shins. It puts more pressure into the calves. And now there's a grinding sensation in the knee. And it all started from where they were in a mental state. and how it changed their posture and how that changed the way they moved. So, but most of it starts in a mental state. I hate to say what starts in your head because yeah, you do have pain in your body and I get that, but it's how you respond to it that becomes very important.

Jeffrey Besecker: So we look at gut-brain interaction and how that triggers our stress response, you know, triggers dopamine release, it triggers all of the cortisol release, cortisol shown to elevate inflammation. That state of disharmony or imbalance is known as dysbiosis in the gut biome and it contributes to that systemic inflammation and intensifies pain through the gut-brain feedback loop. We look at that imbalance in the gut-brain feedback loop and how that triggers a substance known as cytokine. So that cytokine release, then again, perpetuates and fuels that stress response. It fuels the inflammation. We start to get into this kind of compounding effect. So in that role, how do we start to navigate, mitigate that from your perspective, balance that mental state and that emotional state?

Butch Phelps: Yes, that's a great question. So that's part of the thing when I'm working with my clients that I focus on first is, Number one, once you can start to get, to build a visual in their head, for instance, go back to the knee, to build a visual in their head, how does that knee actually work? So in other words, when we talk about the calf muscles and the calf itself, there's two bones there. So we know that if those muscles are soft and loose, the calf then controls the foot vertically, laterally for balance and rotationally. So once I can build a visual picture in their head about how that particular part of their body actually works from a physical side, then I go into, so how does the mental side of this affect that? And so when I'm working with the stretching on it or I'm working with the releasing on it, I'm talking about their breath. I'm talking about how, okay, so we understand that where you're having problems rotating and when you rotate, your knee hurts. Instead of worrying about when that's going to happen again, let's now look at what we can do to prevent that pain from happening to begin with. And when you're using the breath and you're using your hands with that, you start to relax. And then once you then start to see it move and you didn't have pain, it takes about 10 repetitions to start working with the brain. So for instance, if I'm stretching a muscle, whatever, I'm going to have to do it 10 times. And the reason I have to do it 10 times, and they're going to do it very slowly as they do that, we're actually teaching the brain or letting the brain see, I didn't die from that. Nothing tore from that. And what's amazing is that once they do that a few times and the brain starts to see this is safe and I don't have to anticipate that pain, all the stress levels start to drop. And if I don't get up sometimes an hour after I work on somebody, it feels like it's almost gone. And I go, well, it's not totally gone. I said, what happened there? And I explained to them from a mental state, you actually started to look at it as being a safe movement. you slowed down that worry. And when you did, that allowed the muscle to relax. And when the muscle relaxed, it freed the joint. It took the pressure off the nerves. And now when you walk, you get full range of motion back. That is the connection between the physical and that mental side. When they can understand, A, how does it work? B, how does the mental side play a part in it? The physical part becomes easy.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in our pre-call, we talked about how as individuals, we all tend to have varying degrees of pain tolerance. And even in our own interaction, that window of tolerance can increase and diminish. So what role do you think that element of pain tolerance plays in how we approach pain management?

Butch Phelps: It applies very much. It's like when you're talking about somebody who they're in a stressful position where, in other words, you can't freely just go to the hospital, something happens, you break a leg, you break an arm, your pain tolerance then changes because in the brain, you're now looking at survival. You're not just looking at what the injury is. I remember I was in a head-on collision when I was 18 years old and broke my left humerus. And when the car stopped, my hand was backwards. And you would think, oh my God, this would be terrible. This would be horrible. At literally that point, I thought, well, this feels like my arm's asleep, and I need to be able to get out of this car. I just tugged down on my elbow, rotated my arm, and put the bone back together, and then tore my shirt and wrapped around my hand. Now, for anybody on the street, and including myself, if you thought about, that'd be nuts, I would never do that. But what happened was it was about survival took over the pressure of the injury itself. For people who have lower pain tolerances, when I talk to them, what I learned from them is that they are always on high alert and afraid of pain. And it sounds kind of crazy, but believe it or not, when I listen to them, They're always thinking, you know, they pick up a glass of water and could this hurt my shoulder or could this hurt my thumb or whatever? It's almost like they're afraid of pain and any sign of pain at all. They just catastrophize it quickly. I mean, it's just like a fire just takes off. And so getting people to again, understand how their body works. Getting them to be able to breathe and understand it and see and teach themselves how they can see how they can make that movement and that pain not be there seems to let that down. A lot of times it's just in their personality and they'll come back with something else and it'll be something again that to them feels horrible. And the reality is it's probably not that bad, but it has more to do with how they feel. So my first step is understanding where they're coming from and then work with them to calm them back down. Because if I can't calm them back down, that pain is never going to stop.

Jeffrey Besecker: To me, that reinforces that idea of the expectancy bias as a secondary pattern where you start again to predict the pain happening. You start to predict the results. You start to trigger some of that unconsciously. Some of that processing starts to trigger past experiences of pain. It starts to trigger implicit memories of what experiences you had in the past, whether it was pain or even in some of our mental and emotional struggling.

Butch Phelps: Yeah. And some of that can actually be a perceptive pain as well, because, you know, it's like if someone is afraid of water because someone taught them something years ago, or they're afraid of the dark or whatever. Sometimes when you talk to them, they never had an experience of drowning, for instance. But all of a sudden, getting in the water up close to their head becomes really fearful. And then that perception of pain from that then can lead to tightness throughout the body. So it can be a perceived thing as well as an actual trauma in the past, which I find interesting. I mean, I'm not, you know, I haven't studied psychology officially, but I'm sort of like a bro science kind of guy with that. But the thing is, is that You know, when you look at that, and I know it in my own life, there's certain things in my own life that I've run into that it's like I had never liked water. For instance, I used to have a tough time putting my head under the shower. Now I never had any case of possible drowning in my life. Why would that happen? but it's there. And so when I'm dealing with people who have a low tolerance of pain, I try to take that understanding in and say, you know, this could be something that's either actually happened to them or something they perceived that would happen to them. And when I can get them to calm back down, then stopping their chronic pain becomes easier.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking at that aspect in the role conditioning place in how we perceive pain, culturally, we're often fed a lot of messages as men, especially that will suck it up. Experiencing pain, tough it through, you know, man up. Not only with men, but women, we get some of those conditioned responses, perceptions of strength and weakness with how we manage pain. What role do you feel those conditioning patterns play in reinforcing your ideas of how we approach management?

Butch Phelps: Very much so. It's like, you're right. With men, I remember growing up playing football and baseball, I was like, rub some dirt on it, you'll be fine. Boys don't cry. And so when I see Roman men come in and they have an injury, they tend to still hold on to that. And so in some cases, they'll hold on to it and they'll push through and it's like, oh, no, no, I'm going to rub some dirt on it. It'll be fine. And I'll just keep going. And in some cases, they can make the problem actually worse. On the other side of the coin, you know, a lot of times associated with young girls, especially in the past, if a girl was crying, well, mom and dad would hug her and console her and so forth. And so it would affect how she viewed pain in the future. Now, in the last probably two decades, we've been teaching girls to be a little bit tougher. We sort of almost like the boys, you know, just don't let that bother you. You know, it has its goodness, bad points. I mean, you want to be aware that when you feel aches and pains, you want to be aware that they're there. But the conditioning of our culture, the conditioning of our family and so forth can determine how you react to pain a lot. If you're the kind of person who sort of sloughs it off and you can just work through it, understand there's a fine line there that you can work through it to a certain point and that's a good thing, but you can also overdo it and actually make that problem worse. And the same thing on the other side. If you have a low tolerance of pain, I get you, I get your pain, I get what you're feeling and so forth, but you might be making that pain actually worse based on more perceived things than things that are actually happening. And so that becomes real important to take into consideration dealing with chronic pain.

Jeffrey Besecker: So as we're navigating some of that conditioning and considering how we treat pain, how does that influence our availability or openness to medication? Sometimes we might be reluctant to medicate when we need that little bit of push of medication. And how might that also, on the converse side of it, influence over-medication or addiction to pain treatment?

Butch Phelps: I get this question a lot. So sometimes people are surprised with my answer because they're like, but you're a functional massage therapist. I thought you'd be just a purist. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. When you're dealing with a lot of pain from an injury and it's really almost got you to the point of being disabled, taking pain medication to reduce that pain Understand that what it's doing is it's numbing the senses, numbing the pain so that the pain is not just taking your breath away. But realize that you've got work to do. You've now got work to do, but having that pain to go down to where you can tolerate it, now all of a sudden gives you the ability to be able to actually do the work to help resolve the injury, okay? If you go the other way and think, well, I'm just going to load up on the pain pills. And as long as I'm drugged up, I don't feel anything. That's great. That's good. You stop the pain, but you didn't fix anything. So it'd be like going to the dentist with a toothache. He numbs your mouth and says, OK, see you later. I'm done. And you go, wait a minute. You didn't do anything to the tooth. So the pain is going to come back once this numbs away. So there are limits on both ends. My thing for most of my clients when I talk to them is like, if you've got a lot of pain going on, no matter what your tolerance level is, if it's a lot for you, take something to numb that down. But I'll understand you've got more work to do there. And then now you can go to work and focus on what you're doing.

Jeffrey Besecker: Do you feel individuals who might have a tendency for fearful avoidance or emotional reactivity or some of those more psychologically leading responses might tend to have a greater occurrence or higher tendency of Reliance. on pain medication.

Butch Phelps: Yes, yes. Because in some of their minds, it's almost amusing in some cases, in some of their minds, they're thinking that they should live their entire life and never feel pain. That's a little more to the extreme side. But yeah, they will more than likely turn to a painkiller muscle relaxer faster than anybody else. And again, I just try to caution them and say, I get where you're coming from, but we got some work to do here. This is not going to solve your problem.

Jeffrey Besecker: I think it bears in mind to look at that with an open perspective so as to not stigmatize or overgeneralize those personalities, overly categorize them, but still just being mindful as we go through that process of healing. If you tend to have reactivity, if you tend to have some of those condition patterns, that's also going to affect how you manage and cope with pain.

Butch Phelps: That's exactly right. And it is a case by case basis. And again, you never want to overgeneralize. You never want to put people in a stereotypical situation. Pain affects us all different ways. How we deal with that pain. I mean, some people can come in and go into a meditative state and boom, they can knock pain out and do amazing things. That's not everybody. OK. Yeah. And it's like, again, once you can reduce that pain level, now they can start to think clearer. Once they start thinking clearer, you literally start to take the tension out of the body because you take them out of that fight or flight response. And now the healing process can start. And I think that what happens too many times is that we get to the painkiller stage, we get to the muscle relaxer stage, because I just, I've been really amazed at, as I studied muscles over the last 20 years, we don't really spend a lot of time on the emotional side of those muscles. We spend a lot of time on the physical side. And it's like, so when we can work with people who have lower pain tolerances and help them get there, once they learn how to maintain their body, it seems to make them stronger. And it's like, they come back and it's like, I'm just so happy. I didn't even have to reach for the Tylenol. I didn't have to reach for anything. I could just go to do this and it just solved their problem. And I'm like, that's where I want you to be. And it's worked more times than not.

Jeffrey Besecker: So that over-reliance on medication can inhibit the body's natural pain regulating mechanisms and we know fosters dependency. How can we work on managing that balance between healthy medication or a healthy use of medication and more homeopathic approaches to pain management or more natural processes to balance the two?

Butch Phelps: Yeah, you know, sometimes I've been called as a massage therapist. I've been called a, what they call, a more of a westernized massage therapist. I think there's space for both. And I think if we work them correctly, it would work well. You know, for so many practitioners, they're so busy taking the time to really get someone to visualize what's happening with their body, they don't necessarily always have the time for that, which is too bad. Because the more that a person can learn about how their body functions, how their body works, Then you can integrate the medication in with more homeopathic type of work. And between the two, now you give people tools that the next time something like that happens, they start to understand that, okay, this happened before. I need to do this, this, and this, and I can stop that. Now they have more control. And when they do, you have far less anxiety with the person. That's the thing I've noticed with people of all ages. I've worked on people from as young as seven, eight years old, all the way up to 90, 95 years old, and all walks of life from all over the world. That's the thing that I see that once they get a visualization of how I work, there's tools here I can use, even if they have a low pain tolerance, they seem to be far less anxiety as you work with them.

Jeffrey Besecker: So working through that holistic approach, what are some of the more holistic practices we can utilize for that pain management, looking at anything from acupuncture to kinesiology and things of that nature?

Butch Phelps: So, I mean, all of those, when you're looking at acupuncture, chiropractic, you're looking at kinesiology, you're looking at strength training, you're looking at the work that I do is very important. And, you know, the nice thing is, is when you get into things like the work that I do, you can do at home. In fact, what I do is teach people how to do that. Same thing with strength training. There's so many things you can do at home with strength training. You know, if you're not familiar with it, get with a trainer, get someone to teach you. I think where most people make a mistake, especially as they get older, is that they don't realize the loss of muscle mass that we have from age 30 on and the importance of things like proteins in our body and making sure we get the right levels of protein, but also getting the right levels of muscle mass because it's better for their bones. It gives them the strength to keep their mobility. As they do that, they're able to move with less aches and pains. And then what happens is from a mental aspect, now they're in a better mood in most cases because they don't have the aches and pains. What amazes me, you know, people say, seem like people on high anxiety all the time, but it amazes me when I'm sitting with my friends even, and I'm listening to them talk, they're all seem like a mess, you know, and it's like, holy cow, you guys have all kinds of aches and pains. But what we want to be able to do is teach people how to do things on their own. Acupuncture is going to require an acupuncturist. Works well. It works really good. Use people like that so that the things that you do at home, if it's not quite enough, you know you have other resources to go to. You have other people to go to. You know, I work with chiropractors. I work with acupuncturists, kinesiologists. In fact, a kinesiologist was a mentor of mine. When you start to integrate and understand how these things work, Now you have less pain, but if you do need to go in and integrate medications into that, they can work with you and help you do that. And that's why that's important. But the more you can understand about how you work, the less stress you'll have in your body.

Jeffrey Besecker: We mentioned earlier in our pre-call, that simple role of breathing and how that impacts pain. You know, repeated tension and shallow breathing, reinforcing pain responses. So in that regard, share with us some tips and practices of just simple breathing exercises that might help alleviate mage pain.

Butch Phelps: Absolutely. So when you get into shallow breathing, which is what most people will do. In fact, the first time I met a breathing coach, I thought that was the funniest thing. So, tips and things that you can do, you know, I, I meditate every day, every morning and for some people, they think of meditation, they think of someone sitting in a cave and they clear their mind and so forth. Just a general act of sitting in a chair. You could sit in your car in a park someplace if you want to. And just focus on just breathing. Nice, easy, simple breaths. Learning how to just breathe through the nose. Exhale through the mouth. Something as simple as that for as little as five minutes at a time. You'll be amazed at how much calmer your brain and your body will be. The calmer you can make the brain, the calmer the body becomes because the brain is controlling the muscles 100% of the time. So when the brain is hyperactive, the muscles are hyperactive. So that breathing technique of inhaling through the nose, take a full deep breath, and you can count. I mean, it's going to take some practice, but when I first started, I'd start counting and get up to five, six, seven as I'm inhaling. and then exhale back out the same amount of time. And what you'll find is that as you increase your time and get to 15, 20 seconds at a time as you're breathing out, you'll feel the lungs expanding. And for some people that have not expanded in so long, you may even get a slight burn feel in there. and just relax knowing what's going on. You're not going to die from it. And just breathe out and allow the body to relax is a very common thing to do every day. And I mean, you can do it five minutes. You can sit at your desk in an office and do it for five minutes. And so especially when things get tense, and I try to get my people to do that all the time.

Jeffrey Besecker: And then we often discount how simple and essential that practice is, looking at pain, the compounding effect that has. We look at how that helps regulate heart rate variable. We look at how that helps circulate oxygenated blood. We look at how that compounding effect affects hyperkinesis and reducing cytokines. So not only are we regulating the central nervous system, but we're also speeding the healing practice.

Butch Phelps: You know, people talk about stress, you know, being bad for you. A little bit of stress is actually good for us. You know, it's like every once in a while, the saber tooth tiger is chasing us. That's not a bad thing. We need to have that change in our heart rate variability, our thought process. But if that tiger is chasing you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it's going to kill you. You're going to wear out at some point. Yeah, yeah. And for so many people, that saber tooth tiger is chasing them 24 hours a day. And again, taking that little, what I call a brain break is what it is. And just, just focus on the breath. Just inhale deeply, exhale. Give yourself that little break is worth it. And you can do it two or three times a day.

Jeffrey Besecker: As we kind of wrap up here today, what are three practices or tips that can help us to develop the skills that empower us to not only reframe chronic pain, but also manage it better?

Butch Phelps: Yes. Okay. So number one, the breathing is a very big thing for that. Number two, understanding that how the brain and the muscles are interconnected. You know, we hear people talk about muscle memory. We hear people talk about, you know, my muscles just won't let go. Reframe that. Understanding that when you're trying to stretch your body and it feels like the muscles are not letting go, that means your brain is fighting with you. Because the brain is either fearful you're going to tear something or fearful you're going to hurt some part of your body because you just don't think you can do that. That's the second thing. The third thing is really getting an understanding of how your body works. The cap is something I talk about all the time because it's so studied so little, but it's such an important part of the human body. how we walk, how we stand, how we move actually starts at the calf. You can have neck and shoulder pain just from how short your stride is because your ankle can't bend because the calf muscles are too stiff. Learning how that works and how that affects you now starts to reduce the anxiety in your mind because it's no longer an unknown. you see. So if you tie in the breathing, you tie in the fact that with the understanding the brain is controlling the muscle, and then realizing how you're working, it's going to give you a little more sense of empowerment, a little more sense of control about your pain. And then you can start to go into different things like what I do, acupuncture, chiropractor, and so forth. Now you can start to resolve those issues because you can wrap your brain around it. You're not in a panic mode all the time.

Jeffrey Besecker: You know, reframing is a good role to keep front of mind. Not only does it help us regulate the emotional response, it also keeps us in balance and alignment with that pain management. I want to thank you for sharing this insightful conversation with us today. It truly has been an inspiring conversation to look a little deeper and explore how we manage pain, especially as I'm aging. You know, that pain kind of creeps up in a lot of different ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes more pronounced. as we discussed in our pre-call. So thank you for sharing that with us today.

Butch Phelps: Thank you. I've enjoyed being here. I appreciate it a lot. And it's like, you know, once you start to understand that we are a psychological and a physiological being and those things interplay with each other, we can help ourselves so much when it comes to chronic pain. And so thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you for sharing with us. It truly has been an opportunity to see how those elements start to interact. As our listeners are wrapping up with us here today, where can they reach out with you to learn more about a more holistic approach to managing chronic pain?

Butch Phelps: So there's three ways you can get in touch with me. My website is musclerepairshop.com. There you can sign up for a free weekly newsletter. I discuss typical ailments that people deal with their chronic pain every week. And I also give you solutions as well as videos you can follow to help yourself. I have a YouTube channel with 150 free videos that you can get to dive in on the video into specific things that people deal with in chronic pain. And then lastly, I have a book called Stretch and Release on Amazon. And it's like a manual of the things I was talking about of how your body works, why typical things don't necessarily work as efficiently as they should. And then finally, towards the back end of the book, you'll get solutions to how to help your own chronic pain with that. So that's probably the best three ways to learn about me and go forward.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you for sharing that with us. Reach out to Butch and learn more about pain management. Thank you so much for joining us.

Butch Phelps: Thank you, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'd love to have you come back soon.

Butch Phelps: Anytime, anytime.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you. Today we learned how chronic pain is deeply shaped by subconscious patterns like neural imprinting and autonomic dysregulation. In our conversation with Butch Phelps, we explored how emotional suppression, stress responses, and gut health influence the pain cycle. Healing begins by integrating mind and body, fostering emotional regulation, and building resilience. The path to relief lies in integrating psychological and physiological healing. Embracing emotional regulation, shifting ingrained behaviors, and fostering mind-body resilience. If you found value and meaning in today's episode, please share it with a friend or loved one. And as always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.