How I Cultivated an Ownership Mindset to Manage My Chronic Pain

This is the first post in Rick's series on managing his own chronic pain condition.

1. You Manage Your Pain I: How I Cultivated an Ownership Mindset to Manage My Chronic Pain (this post)
2. You Manage Your Pain II: The Three Tools I Use to Manage My Chronic Pain
3. How I Stay out of the Chronic Pain Cycle (coming soon)
4. More to come!

In order for me to actively manage my Injury, I had to learn three key things and practice applying them - a lot:

1. Embrace Mental Models
   A Mental Model is a useful simplification of a complex reality that aids in learning. Good ones drive positive action. In the context of chronic pain, a mental model simplifies your understanding of the physiology of your injury and mechanisms of interventions.

2. Adopt Foundational Beliefs
   A Belief is a conviction or acceptance that something is true or exists, sometimes before you see proof.

3. Practice Action Recipes
   A Recipe is a structured step-by-step guide to achieve a desired outcome or solution.

These three things build on each other. Every Mental Model, Belief, and Recipe is independently useful. When combined, they create a virtuous cycle that is critical to my current Ownership Mindset.

Behavioral scientist Devorah Klein developed the concept of Adherence Loop , where patients who 1) believe a treatment will improve their condition, 2) understand how the treatment works, 3) know exactly how to use the treatment, and 4) see the positive results from it are more likely to stick to the treatment regimen than patients who lack some or all of these attributes - and consequently, have better outcomes.

Mental Models, Beliefs, and Action Recipes work together and reinforce each other in similar ways. And my approach to these tools are heavily informed by the Adherence Loop concept.

To give more credit where it’s due, most of the specific Beliefs, Mental Models, and Recipes that have helped me break out of the Victim Mindset are adapted from the clinical practice of Luke Ferdinands - my physical therapist, as well as my Alleviate Co-Founder.

So, in summary, this is about transitioning from a state where pain controlled my life and limited my choices to one where I actively manage my pain. I achieved the mindset shift through the application of tools to put the mindset into action: simple Mental Models, empowering Beliefs, and practical Recipes.

It’s often underappreciated that managing a long-term injury is both a physical game and a mental one. The Ownership Mindset is a structured way to have a strong mental game. With a resilient mindset, I believe many of you can also reclaim control over your favorite activities and reduce the impact of pain on your daily life, relationships, and overall well-being.

To be clear, the Ownership Mindset is not about ignoring pain or willing yourself to push through it. It’s about being able to take an active role in recognizing, managing, and preventing pain. When I break down the Mental Models, Beliefs, and Recipes in the next post, I think the distinction will become even clearer.

To your health till then,

Rick

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