Today is a great day because spring is coming and our snow is finally melting. From a pain standpoint I’m not doing so hot as my nervous system took yet another flare up the other day. It definitely wasn’t something planned. I mean who expects there breaks to fail on there car sending them through a red light into oncoming traffic!!! That’s what happened and I’m sure that it caused things to get worse in the last two days. I’m just happy that I wasn’t hurt. I don’t exactly need anything else to go wrong right now do I!!!

Sometimes the stress that we encounter can’t be planned for, so in situations like that we just have to deal with what happens. In my case I use my breathing techniques and the relaxation techniques to calm my system to try to recover faster. There are times though that we can control some of our surroundings to make things easier for us. Some of us that suffer from CRPS have a hard time dealing with things like crowds, noise, or just stress in general.

Crowds and noise seem to come as a package deal lots of times. This makes it hard to attend things like family gatherings, or going out with a group of friends. If your always missing these things then it’s easy to become isolated which isn’t good, as well as reducing your quality of life. What you need to do is find a balance so that you can take part in those things as well as not making your condition worse. This then becomes a game of trial and error, trying to figure out what’s going to work. I wish I could say do this or do that, however what works for one person doesn’t always work for the next.

It isn’t easy to explain however what has happened is that over time, I have been able to figure out what I can and can’t take for noise. What I mean by this is that on any given day depending on what my pain is like my body is able to determine how much stress and noise it can withstand before the pain gets to bad. It isn’t something that I just set a limit to. I find that as I expose myself slowly to noisy situations I’m listening to my body more carefully. Then what I find is that I am able to determine from that, how to set limits and work with what my body is telling me.

Slowly I’ve been able to expose myself to things that I wasn’t able to take before. I have a very loud family when it comes to family gatherings, because of the size of our family. We needed to figure out how I could be involved but not let the noise affect me. So my wife suggested earplugs to dull the noise. I’ve tried this on a couple of occasions and happy to say that it has helped. Do I like using earplugs? No not really but if it lets me interact in things that I want to then great. Limiting my time that I’m at a family function is another way to control my pain level. It’s a matter of figuring out your limits, and letting your body guide you and tell you when it’s had enough.

I do have to say that all of this is still a work in progress. I’m still trying to figure out my limits and how they affect my pain levels. What I am saying is that as you figure this out, you also learn to control the stress that you encounter on a daily basis. You start to figure out your limits before you become to stressed. This isn’t something that happens over night it takes time to do this. Even though I’m only able to take so much noise, I find that at least I’m getting out there and trying.

This allows me to feel normal to some degree and not miss out on things that I want to do. If you have trouble dealing with noise and crowds then I encourage you to try what works for you. Eventually the idea is that you are able to increase your tolerance, because your retraining your brain to tell it that everything is OK and that the noise doesn’t bother you.