What is the relationship between pain and stress? Arik Gohl

Pain is a lot more of an acute kind of presentation of stress. It's something you can really feel and know is there, where stress. You know, I've noticed for a lot of people when I first interview them, I'll say, hey, you know, what's your level of stress like? And I can see the person has a high level of stress, but they'll tell me, I don't really feel any stress. But their presentation is showing me different, the way they're acting, the way they're moving. So that would tell me that this person has been under stress probably as long as they've been cognizant. But because they're feeling pain at this point, they're much more aware of something going on in their body, but they don't really know why, and they really don't know how to. How to associate that with stress because they don't feel stressed. Even though if you were to take their blood pressure and just look at how they're, you know, what they're doing, moving, talking, et cetera, you'd say, yes, person is suffering a high level of anxiety.

Hi, my name is Stuart Alsop, and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. So what I do in this podcast is I interview all types of crazy people, and I let you decide who is going to be a genius and who is just crazy. And I'm not putting any value judgments on what crazy means. It's also a very relative topic that depends on the person talking. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying is basically grab onto that fear, realize that it's there, and just go with it. Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them. Today I interviewed Eric Gol, the founder and creator of Manual Ligament Therapy, a new type of bodywork that specializes in applying light pressure to the ligaments to induce a parasympathetic or rest and digest nervous system response. So basically, get someone really, really relaxed really quickly. For those of you who don't know, I've been dealing with chronic pain for many years, and I met Eric when I was living in Guadalajara just a couple months ago, and he showed me this bodywork and practiced it on me. And it was one of the most effective things that I've found in my life for reversing this chronic pain that I've been dealing with a long time. So I was really interested to sit down with Eric for 45 minutes and get his wisdom on the connection between stress and creativity and also the difference between stress and pain.