Injury, Identity and Expectations
Injuries are inevitable, but that doesn’t make them suck any less. Beyond the physical setback that an injury presents us with, we are also presented with psychological challenges as significantly if not more so. When we do get injured, there is often a sense of hopelessness or a loss of control. While I am not a healthcare professional, nor do I advocate you be your own, there are certain things we can all look out for and try to accomplish to make the injury process easier and feel like less of a setback. That said, there are a number of things we can do or try to avoid to make the injury and recovery process less worrisome and regain some control of our situation.
When we get injured as athletes, we often experience a suspension of our identity. As climbers especially, so much of our identity, our social life, and our psychological well-being is wrapped up in our ability to climb and perform. When we’re unable to climb due to an injury, it can be an incredibly isolating experience, especially if we do not have other interests to pursue while we are recovering.
While we may not be able to climb at the level we could before the injury, or even climb at all, there are still many things we can do to stay present in our sport. Simply showing up to practice or showing up to the gym to watch and support your friends can be a great way to stay in our social circles and to connect with people who may have dealt with a similar injury in the past. Seeing those people climb despite their injury history can help foster positive expectations for ourselves in the recovery process.
If you can climb on easier terrain without aggravating your injury, this is an even more impactful way to regain some sense of control in the face of an injury. If you have a finger injury that prevents you from pulling hard on crimps, but you can still grab certain holds without making the injury worse, you can and should still be climbing. If climbing is off the table altogether, focusing on other aspects of your fitness such as strength and power training can be another or an additional way to “stay in the game”. So while we may need to adapt our climbing and training to our injury, there is always something we can do.
Another common experience for injured athletes is fear avoidance. When we have pain, we cope with it in one of two ways: Either we keep pushing through the pain, ultimately making the injury worse, or we avoid the pain altogether. Neither option is ideal, but often avoiding the pain altogether can lead to worse outcomes than accepting some degree of pain when it is appropriate.
To understand why this is, we need to understand a little bit about pain science. The neurons responsible for sending “pain signals” to our brain are called nociceptors. These neurons receive input from somatic receptors in the form of mechanical, chemical, or thermal stimulation. They do not receive “pain stimulation”. Whether an input is painful, is determined by the magnitude of that stimulation plus many more factors beyond the biological nerve-to-brain input.
Factors such as the novelty of the stimulus, our level of arousal, thoughts/beliefs/expectations, and other larger factors such as sleep, diet, and life stress all play into the complex and multifactorial experience of pain. Because our experience of pain is multifactorial in nature, we can say that pain is more complex than just tissue damage. You can have pain without damage and damage without pain.
This is both important and empowering to understand, especially when we are dealing with chronic pain. With chronic injuries, often our pain has less to do with physical damage and more to do with a heightened neural “alarm system”. Our brains like patterns, and we are really good at remembering harmful stimuli. When we have been in pain for a long time (2-3+ months), our brain has gotten good at identifying those painful patterns and turned the volume knob to 11 as a way to “protect” us from what it identifies as potential damage. While this is an important response in the early stages of injury, the reality of the situation is that at a certain point, our tissue has healed as much as it is going to regardless of what your brain is telling you.
Often recovering from this type of pain involves some level of retraining our nervous system to understand that a stimulus that may have been dangerous before is no longer the threat your brain thinks it is. To prevent us from getting to this stage however, we must learn to challenge our pain at a certain point in the recovery process. This is where working with a healthcare professional becomes critical, as identifying the timeframe for your recovery is difficult to do without an understanding of your particular injury and the appropriate knowledge and experience to work through it.
With our newfound understanding of pain science, we can start to see how expectations play into the timeline of our recovery. Negative expectations are powerful, often more so than positive ones. And, if we grant power to unhelpful expectations, it can lead us to fear avoidance, suspension of identity, and an overall sense of helplessness to our injury. Therefore, anything we can do to foster positive expectations will prove beneficial to our recovery. This includes connecting with people who have recovered from the same injury, avoiding google, talking to a healthcare professional who is familiar with your sport, doing some strength training to maintain and improve your level of fitness, and many other things.
While staying positive may not physically heal us, our goal is to create a favorable environment to allow ourselves to heal, and maintaining positive expectations makes up a large part of that process. Understanding a little about pain and allowing ourselves to participate in meaningful activities despite our injury only takes us further and allows us to regain some control over our situation. While injuries are never fun, they are an inevitable part of the process if you participate in any sport. But hopefully knowing a little about what makes for a successful recovery beyond physical healing can make for a smoother, less worrisome recovery.
