Boil the Frog Slowly

The title of this post is to do with an account that I heard as a child about how you can kill a frog by putting it in a pot of water and then gently increasing the temperature of the water to boiling. Because the temperature is increasing slowly, the frog keeps adjusting to it until it's too late.

I never liked it - I couldn't imagine why anyone would take all the trouble to work out this particularly cruel way of killing a poor frog.

But reading this post today - Your Back Pain is Killing Me! suddenly reminded me of this story.

We're very frog like in this respect - we adjust to slowly increasing levels of pain until it reaches unbearable levels, and by then the injury that the pain was signalling has probably reached a critical stage.

Funnily enough, the opposite also applies.

We adjust to slowly decreasing levels of pain until it's all gone, and then we forget that the pain was ever there.

As an Alexander teacher, I've always found this fascinating -

how people would come in for lessons with fairly acute wrist or shoulder pain and then a few lessons on, the pain or discomfort would have gradually lessened... to the extent that I've had some of them look blankly at me when I asked them, 'How's your wrist/shoulder now?'

This is fantastic, if we can remember not to go back to doing the things that brought on the pain in the first place!