Chronic Pain Triggers Resources

Hi, readers. As a person with chronic migraines, I do my best to monitor my "triggers" and try to avoid them. In case you don't know, triggers are activities, substances, or occurrences that tend to cause worse pain episodes in individuals. For example, some of my triggers are stress, the lights in Walmart, shifts in barometric pressure, and artificial sweeteners, but triggers are different for every person. While most people associate triggers with migraines, they do play a role in other chronic pain disorders as well--just think about the people with arthritis who get worse pain when it rains, or my relative with Fibromyalgia who gets worse pain when she eats certain preservatives. If you are interested, I have gathered several resources that contain information about what triggers are, how to identify triggers, common triggers, etc.

Since I couldn't find a good online resource about this, I would also like to briefly discuss the difference between triggers and causes. I got this information from talking a doctor at Mayo Clinic, as well as my local headache specialist. They said that people with chronic pain are predisposed to feel pain, and often react to things that would not cause pain in other people. In other words, triggers don't cause the chronic pain disorder (usually), but it can still be important to identify and avoid them because it can help decrease the frequency of your worse pain attacks.

1. Identifying Pain Triggers

Link: http://www.headache-help.org/identify-migraine-triggers

This website is discussing migraine triggers, but  this advice is easily transferable for any pain disorder. The article explains the correlation between triggers and pain attacks, and offers some advice about how to track your activities, food, etc. with a pain diary to watch for any possible triggers that might be making things worse.

2. Some Common Pain Triggers

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/health/8-everyday-things-that-cause-pain-104858685898.html

This is a short list of common pain triggers. This article does often call these activities causes of chronic pain, which is an oversimplification for most chronic pain patients, but these activities may certainly worsen chronic pain. The list also describes some things chronic pain patients can do to help lessen the effects of these triggers. I will also add a brief list of other common triggers from my personal knowledge: artificial sweeteners, changes in the weather, certain foods (these vary by pain condition and person, the best way to figure out which, if any, foods bother you is to keep a pain journal), sickness, certain types of intense exercise, lack of sleep, and skipping meals. Of course, triggers vary for everyone--these are just a few common ones. 

3. List of Artificial Sweeteners-One Common Trigger

Link: http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/artificial-sweeteners/art-20046936

Of course, not every chronic pain patient is going to have attacks triggered by artificial sweeteners. However, it is a common trigger and, since it is hard to find a good list of all the different artificial sweeteners (as I know, since they are big triggers for me), I thought I would provide this resources I found. This list lists the many different sweeteners there are. There are so many different names for each sweetener, which are listed so you can better look for them in the ingredients list of food labels. It is important to note that the column list marked natural sweeteners would probably not be triggers for people who can't eat artificial sweeteners.