7 Mental Traps to Avoid After Physical or Emotional Injuries
This is a very old blog post that comes from my first blog in 2013. Nostalgia made me put it back here.
When you practice sports, you get injuries. When you take risks in business or academic life, you can face failures. At home, you can be hurt emotionally (and even physically sometimes). Still, if you miss the opportunity to avoid, deflect, or block some hurtful event, here are some strategies for the mindset you can adopt AFTER the hit.
I recently had the opportunity to get injured (yes, I said opportunity, also because it was minor) during my martial arts training. I am now in a cycle of recovery and low training (or none) for a few weeks. Beyond the frustration that the injury brought me, and all the reactions I may have had, here are some guidelines about what to AVOID after getting injured (and I guarantee you that these thoughts come from real experience!). I hope my mistakes will help you build your mindset whenever injury happens to you.
1. Impatience: The Most Damaging Reaction
Maybe the most frequent and the most natural reaction to injury, especially after training. Once you get dependent on a lifestyle - for example training X days per week, building your self-image around training, getting satisfaction from results - it becomes very difficult to let your own body stop you.
Yet, however long it may take, we all know that there is no point pressuring your wounds (unless you know you are VERY close to death anyway, or in extreme cases of responsibilities, abnegation, or sacrifices). Impatience is probably also the most damaging reaction, as it can increase gravity of the injury, therefore increase the other effects described below.
The key insight: Your body has its own timeline for healing. Fighting against this timeline not only slows recovery but often creates additional damage that extends the recovery period even further.
2. Anger: Keeping Your Mind in the Past
Anger towards life, or anger towards whoever hurt you, accidentally or not, will definitely not heal you. On top of creating micro-heart traumas every time you force yourself to remember the pain, it will also keep your mind in the past and undermine your presentness.
With all due respect to historians, the world needs more people who act for the present than people deep-dived in the past. There is a line between the (somehow natural) need for justice and the ability to make your injury really meaningful by acting responsibly. You know on which side of the line anger will keep you.
3. Loss of Morale: Allowing Fire to Spread to Safe Zones
There is no doctor for willpower - your body might get hurt (badly) and be cured, but your mindset is yours to care for. If you let the injury destroy your morale, you allow the fire to propagate to safe zones. Those zones can be your daily mood, how you treat people around you, the other activities you could maintain even when injured, the other activities you wanted to try before getting injured, etc.
Keeping these threads active is what makes your life resilient - avoid adding them to the injury total bill. Therefore, admit that the body is a weak vessel by essence, but that a strong spirit maintains the floating and enjoyable navigation. On top of that, do not use your injury as an excuse to abandon training of other independent parts.
4. Pride: The Double-Edged Sword
There are at least two reasons why you should not pull out pride from your injuries. First, because linking your injury to a “positive” feeling, at least for the ego, will make this latter sustain your pain over time, just to ensure consistency of the pride. Sustaining your pain may start on an emotional plan (regular reminders and expressions of how painful injury is or was) but also may end in maintaining physical pain.
Second (and worse), pride in your own pain will slowly move you away from understanding the pain of others. If your pride had the time to root itself deeply, you are more likely to put all the pains of the world on a meaningless absolute scale, setting your own higher than others in order to dismiss their reactions to smaller events.
Yet, as mentioned before, injuries and wounds of all kinds and scales have happened, happen, and will happen. Focusing on valuating yours will naturally make you overlook others’. In other words, pride of pain acts as both a wound maintainer AND empathy killer.
5. Guilt: Disguised Pride Keeping You in the Past
As well as morale loss and anger, guilt of having got injured keeps you in the past instead of the present. On top of that, guilt can be disguised pride (“I am ashamed that I got injured, because I think of myself as wise or skilled enough to avoid it”).
Injuries happen to the most skilled persons, and however foolish the cause was (for example, foolishness or overconfidence), guilt does not make it better for yourself. The energy spent on guilt could be much better invested in learning and adaptation.
6. Forgetting to Actively Learn: Missing the Inner Opportunity
Slip on a banana skin once and you’ll be wary of banana skins. Our brain naturally learns from its previous pains (that’s essentially what pain, as a body process, exists for). Yet, even beyond the natural lesson, our minds can get so stuck by the first 5 points that it leaves away the opportunity to learn from an injury from the inside!
Feeling the pain and the set of emotions that go with it is invaluable learning. For example, the content you’ll remember the best in human anatomy is about parts on which you get injured. Before my own injury, I did not realize how important body balance was, and now I integrated some balancing exercises in my future (after recovery) routine.
Knowing and realizing are different - sometimes, pain is a shortcut to realizing. Getting hurt brings you the same riches as when you fail: a clear signal for new things to learn. Ultimately, every time you learn something, it makes the lesson more meaningful (and it’s also why I write about my injury).
7. Forgetting to Adapt: The Practical Dimension
Last, and more practical than philosophical, do not forget to adapt your lifestyle to your injury. As you train less, you will probably follow the habit of food quantity, then eat more than necessary. Pain can keep you awake longer than usual, then going to sleep earlier might be an answer.
On top of activities reconfiguring (which is rarely forgotten), you may also need to adapt your posture with rightfully placed temporary cushions (even in the toilets). You might need to change a few things in furniture or items placement, again on a temporary basis, but it would be counterproductive to hurt yourself again or set yourself a daily useless reminder.
Universal Application
Of course, I do not wish you any injury, I hope that you’ll remember the 7 points if it ever occurs to you, and that my minor pain will be useful to you as it was useful to me. Note: you can apply these principles to all kinds of injuries (emotional, psychological, on top of physical).
The framework works whether you’re dealing with:
- Physical injuries from sports or accidents
- Emotional wounds from relationships or loss
- Professional setbacks or failures
- Academic disappointments
- Creative blocks or artistic failures
The Resilience Mindset
The common thread through all these recommendations is the cultivation of a present-focused, learning-oriented resilience. Instead of getting trapped in past-focused emotions (anger, guilt) or future-focused anxiety (impatience), the healthiest recovery mindset stays grounded in:
- Present acceptance of current limitations
- Active learning from the experience
- Systematic adaptation to new circumstances
- Preservation of unaffected areas of life
- Compassion for self and others going through similar challenges
Recovery is not just about returning to your previous state - it’s about becoming more resilient, more empathetic, and more skilled at navigating life’s inevitable setbacks.
Have a smiling day!