Stress is a normal part of life – you become stressed when you face hard situations or have a lot to deal with. 

That’s because stress has a vital function. If we’re under threat, stress gets us ready to take action. Similar to how acute pain lets us know when something is wrong in the body. 

When they function as they should, stress and pain are positive additions to your life, helping to keep you safe. However, if you’re constantly stressed, stress can become chronic. 

A chronically stressed person has an overactive nervous system – one that’s on edge for the next email from our boss, the next phone call from a friend, or even the next lockdown. This overactive nervous system can be the tipping point and begin the cycle of chronic pain.

There might be an event, such as a gym injury, that brings on your pain, or it might creep on over time. However, when the pain does start, it’s likely to feel more painful than if you weren’t stressed. A 2015 meta-study published in the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences found that we feel pain more intensely when we’re stressed. In particular, negative emotions heighten the impact of stress on pain. 

A study that illustrates this fantastically is one carried out by Boeing. In the study, Boeing teamed up with researchers to identify risk factors for reporting acute back pain at work. 3,020 aircraft employees took part in the study, so this wasn’t a small sample! The researchers found that heavy lifting or repetitive work didn’t predict back pain, but feeling underappreciated did. That’s right, the workers who experienced the worst back pain were the ones who felt chronically underappreciated. 

So, if you’re stressed, you’re more likely to get pain in the first place. That pain might be bad too, which is in itself stressful. 

Once you’re in pain, stress can keep the cycle of pain going. Research indicates that stress influences people’s labelling and attribution of pain. If you’re stressed, you might be more likely to fixate on your pain or label it as something that’s “really bad” instead of “a bit annoying”. 

The crux of developing pain and then fixating on it is that our brain and nervous system are plastic, meaning they’re really good at forming habits. Research suggests our brains can undergo a sensitivity adjustment if we’ve been experiencing pain for a while. Essentially, our brain becomes very good at detecting danger and sending pain as a warning signal. So, although you’re desperately trying to avoid pain, your brain becomes better at creating it.

Does this mean you’re not in pain? Not at all. Your pain is genuine. Could you have reacted differently? No, your brain and body were doing what has helped humans survive for millions of years. It’s essential to make the distinction that just because your mood impacts your perception of pain, it doesn’t mean that pain is your “fault” because you’re stressed. Instead, your constant stress reflects how our wiring doesn’t match our modern way of life.

However, what’s important to take away is that our perception of pain can be changed by how we’re feeling. Stress and pain are two parts of the same underlying neurobiological system and are interconnected. We still don’t understand the relationship entirely. However, if you’re experiencing chronic stress, it may very well be aggravating your wrist pain or hand pain.

Graston Technique is a specialised massage that uses ‘scraping’ tools to release connective and soft tissue adhesions. 

Soft tissue adhesions are often the root cause of hand or wrist pain. These types of adhesions can come from almost any history of physical injury, trauma or overuse and are a bit like a tiny spider web that creates tissue tension and irritation. 

We’ve found that using Graston Technique to release adhesions can bring shockingly fast relief for many wrist pain and hand pain sufferers, even for those patients who have struggled for years.

Again, research backs up what we’ve witnessed at the clinic and suggests Graston Technique is an effective treatment for hand and wrist pain.

– De Quervain diseases (see research here)

– Trigger finger (see research here)

– Dupuytren disease (see research here)

– Carpal tunnel (see research here)

– Tendonitis (see research here)

A wise woman once said, “it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it” – and she was right! Funnily enough, this also makes a great analogy for explaining hand and wrist pain.

How we do a task matters. When you perform a task in a smooth, relaxed and efficient way, it puts far less stress on the body than if you do it in a way that’s tense and awkward. How you grapes a steering wheel, a barbell, or even your pen can all contribute to your hand pain and wrist pain. These habits don’t seem bad in isolation, but hand and wrist pain can come knocking if you do them for days, months, and even years.

If you suffer from wrist and hand pain, adjusting how you do something can improve your pain immensely. Happily, any pain clinician who knows their stuff should be able to tell you just what you need to do to eliminate your pain.

So, we know that the complex structure of the wrist and hand can be prone to wear and tear from everyday life, but what are some different types of hand and wrist pain?

– Diffuse non-specific pain in the forearm or wrist: Experiencing pain in the absence of there being anything wrong with your hand/wrist.

– Dupuytren disease: Pain caused by a gradual thickening and tightening of tissue under the skin in hand.

– Trigger finger: A condition in which a finger gets stuck in a bent position and then snaps straight.

– Tendinopathy: Pain caused by inflammation or degeneration of one or more tendons in the wrist/hand.

– De Quervain’s disease: Pain caused by the two tendons around the base of your digits becoming swollen.

– Carpal tunnel syndrome: Pain caused by irritation to the median nerve in the carpal tunnel.

– Osteoarthritis: Pain caused when the protective cartilage that cushions the ends of the bones wears down over time.