The mental stress of injuries– is this why doing your rehab is so hard?

Unfortunately, if you’re coming to us you’re probably injured (unless you’re just coming for our dashing personalities and good looks….).

What spurred this little rant stems from a patient comment last week, that although they were getting better, it’s a depressing way to start the day when your first steps out of bed are painful and you are expecting that every morning- it ends up rather demotivating.

Quite often I think people underestimate the mental strain that you undergo during an injury (especially one that requires a long period of rehab) and the effect it has on your motivation.

Is this a why we struggle with our rehab exercises so much?

So here is my 10 cents worth (used to be 5 cents, but that damn inflation gets ya) on why it can be so hard to do your rehab.

Part one:

First things first:

In simple terms when you’re injured, you’re obviously dealing with pain (again not fun), but I think even more frustrating for most people is the loss of function (i.e you suddenly can’t do the things you want). This ranges from simple things like dressing, sitting comfortably, walking and running all the way through to high level sport and exercise.

You were running yesterday, now you’re 3 months away from doing that!!!.

It takes a massive toll on your mental health, and this can be made worse by life stressors, work, financial, relationship difficulties, kids etc.

Suddenly you are out of your normal exercise routine and your motivation slumps.

With motivation, we have found that people tend to go through phases.

1). Denial- about your injury and the severity of it- emotions may compel you to think that your injury isn’t as bad as your physio says it is, or the recovery process doesn’t apply to you.

A mixture of emotion and ego can cause you to skip your rehabilitation and disobey limitations (naughty naughty) set by us (your physios).

2). Peak motivation time comes early for most people- you’re in pain and can’t do what you want - so you are super motivated to do everything you need to help.

So you do your exercises! (well most of you) and surprise surprise it gets better…..

3). Mid phase, your pain is much reduced and you have gained a fair bit of function back- things are looking up! Work and life are busy and you are able to do more, so you start skipping your exercises as it’s getting better…….

4). Later phase, you’ve started exercising again yeh!!

You’re not quite there but well enough to do most things. You know all those exercises you were told to do, well, it’s not so bad anymore, so you start forgetting about them (it’s not front of you mind anymore) and you’re able to do some exercise again anyway- this is the danger zone……

From a pure physio point of view it’s awesome that you’re exercising again, but why should you continue your rehab when you’re not in pain…..?

Well, here is the tricky junction -your function is coming back, but you will still be in a state where you are weaker than you think as the injury is still recovering. In this state you are still at risk of setbacks, time to knuckle down and still get the rehab done.

Part two: coming up in our next blog:

The key reason we think why people struggle with their rehab and how we can help.