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Pain cups and energy spoons

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Greg Lehman published a nice new blog post about a useful metaphor:

“The cup metaphor suggests that pain occurs when all of the stressors/loads in our lives exceed the space in our cup. When we overflow we have pain.”

From Do our patient's need fixing? Or do they need a bigger cup?

And spoons! See also spoon theory, a related metaphor about the limited amount of energy available for life and work when you suffer from a disability or chronic illness. Or chronic pain, of course.

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