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For the last two years, typing for 5+ minutes hurt my wrists. I tried a lot of things: shots, physical therapy, trigger-point therapy, acupuncture, massage tools, wrist and elbow braces at night, exercises, stretches. Sometimes it got better. Sometimes it got worse.
No Beat Saber, no lifting weights, and every time I read a damn book I would start translating the punctuation into Dragon NaturallySpeaking syntax.
Text: "Consider a bijection f:X→Y"
My mental narrator: "Cap consider a bijection space dollar foxtrot colon cap x backslash tango oscar cap y dollar"
Have you ever tried dictating a math paper in LaTeX? Or dictating code? Telling your computer "click" and waiting a few seconds while resisting the temptation to just grab the mouse? Dictating your way through a computer science PhD?
And then.... and then, a month ago, I got fed up. What if it was all just in my head, at this point? I'm only 25. This is ridiculous. How can it possibly take me this long to heal such a minor injury?
I wanted my hands back - I wanted it real bad. I wanted it so bad that I did something dirty: I made myself believe something. Well, actually, I pretended to be a person who really, really believed his hands were fine and healing and the pain was all psychosomatic.
And... it worked, as far as I can tell. It totally worked. I haven't dictated in over three weeks. I play Beat Saber as much as I please. I type for hours and hours a day with only the faintest traces of discomfort.
Steven Byrnes provides an explanation here, but I think he's neglecting the potential for belief systems/systems of interpretation to be self-reinforcing.
Predictive processing claims that our expectations influence what we observe, so experiencing pain in a scenario can result in the opposite of a placebo effect where the pain sensitizes us. Some degree of sensitization is evolutionary advantageous - if you've hurt a part of your body, then being more sensitive makes you more likely to detect if you're putting too much strain on it. However, it can a... (read more)
It was probably just regression to the mean because lots of things are, but I started feeling RSI-like symptoms a few months ago, read this, did this, and now they're gone, and in the possibilities where this did help, thank you! (And either way, this did make me feel less anxious about it 😀)