How fibromyalgia symptoms can be managed by slow and controlled breathing Fibromyalgia Community

One of the biggest issues of having fibromyalgia is the pain that is felt in eleven different pressure points throughout the body.

But while the most noticeable thing one feels having fibromyalgia is physical pain and people with fibromyalgia also suffer from another kind of pain and that is the emotional side of things.

The true and clear symptoms of fibromyalgia include stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, cognitive issues, sleeping problems and mood disorder.

Unfortunately, it is true that the more the emotional pain is felt by a person, the worse their physical pain becomes. Therefore, if this emotional pain is not controlled, the physical pain will not get better as well.

Fibromyalgia is a complex and mysterious chronic disease, but it goes untreated for a long time period, it will have the worse effect on your life even in doing routine activities. It will be much harder for you to take care of the house and do work at your job.

You can look for the professional treatment, but it would be great if you start controlling fibromyalgia on your own. The first step in controlling fibromyalgia is controlling the emotional pain. You should not let your fibromyalgia control you.

In this article, we are going to discuss the types of emotional pain a fibromyalgia patient can feel and one of the best ways to control it (slow and controlled breathing).

Depression vs. Anxiety

Depression and anxiety are the two most predominant forms of emotional pain a fibromyalgia patient feels. These two can be experienced simultaneously often times.

The extreme sadness that a patient feels all day is depression. Depression is not the same as feeling down in the dumps after a bad dad. Depression is actually feeling sad throughout every single day, no matter how good or bad your day is.

It is common for a fibromyalgia patient to act in a bad way by lashing out against others, crying or feeling angry when he/she is depressed. These are all normal symptoms of depression.

Feeling worried and fearful in an almost anxious manner over little things is anxiety. A small feeling of your heart racing over going to job interview is not the same thing as chronic anxiety, just like as the temporary feeling of sadness is not the same as depression. If you feel anxious and fearful about every little thing that happens in your day is actually anxiety.

The link with breathing

The two most critical emotional pains that a fibromyalgia patient feels, is depression and anxiety. But, having more depression and anxiety will result in more physical pain.

Of course, there are medications and therapies that you can take to deal with your problem. But you can also try slow and controlled breathing if you want to deal with your problem on your own before looking for a professional help.

According to a recent study by ‘Pain’, a reputable medical journal, slow breathing can help in controlling a person’s emotional pain.

The emotional pain can extremely become reduced by simple exercises like meditating, sitting down and breathing slow or even doing yoga.

The study of ‘Pain’ took twenty-seven different women who showed clear fibromyalgia symptoms and also reported to have both physical and emotional pain.

The same study also picked 25 different women who were totally healthy and most of the same age as the women with fibromyalgia.

Altogether, fifty-two women were in the study and the researchers asked them to practice slow and controlled breathing. All the women from both the groups, with and without fibromyalgia reported having less emotional distress and reduced pain subsequently.

However, less emotional distress and physical pain were reported by women without fibromyalgia.

So, the women without fibromyalgia considered having more benefits of this as compared to women with fibromyalgia, but the fact is that every woman in the study reported having less emotional and physical pain after having slow and controlled breathing.

This was the first study in which slow and controlled breathing was taken into consideration. In addition to this, no specific breathing method was used in the study.

The women were just asked to slow down their breathing and control it and they find it effective. So, you can choose any method to breathe slowly and it should work for you.

Still, we have limited knowledge about fibromyalgia and the diagnosis of fibromyalgia is very difficult as well. The reason can be overlapping of the symptoms with other chronic diseases and conditions.

But if you have reported less pain in the study, maybe it doesn’t matter that you are having fibromyalgia. Why spend all the money on knowing whether you officially have fibromyalgia or not?

Why not try a controlled and slow breathing technique to control the pain, if you are feeling pain and pain symptoms.

Stress

Stress can be controlled by slow and controlled breathing beside depression, anxiety and physical pain.

Stress can be controlled by this technique because it can balance out the nervous system. The nervous system causes a person to react to stress by increasing the person’s heart rate and blood pressure and causes the person to perspire and sweat.

Slow and controlled breathing technique can control the nervous system and think of this nervous system as an accelerator for feeling stress.

From all the above discussion, you should come to know that you also have emotional pain and not just physical pain. You can also visit a professional for help but try slow and controlled breathing exercises will help you in controlling stress, depression and anxiety for a longer time period on your own.