I healed RSI using only my mind

4 days ago 2

How I used my mind to heal my hands

This article is about typing related pain that I will refer to as RSI¹. After experiencing RSI in my hands for a long time, I have at last arrived at a place where I understand what caused it, and how I can prevent it in the future. This is a recollection of how I got here. If this article is to be of any use to anyone, it will be to the open minded² reader.

The Pain
- It Got Worse
The Cope
The Fear
The Desperation
- Is This Real?
The Cure
The Mechanism
The Relapse
What was really going on
Further Reading

The Pain

My RSI started in 2022 when I began to develop a pain in the middle joint of my middle finger on my right hand.

my middle finger hurting

It hurt when typing, but also at various times throughout the day. The pain resolved after taking a break from the computer for a few weeks. Thereafter it tended to come back now and again, leaving me in doubt as to what would trigger it. I remember going to see the Doctor about it but they were not much help, I got prescribed pain killers and some kind of steroid cream if I remember correctly.

It Got Worse

In the spring 2023 the symptoms became significantly worse whilst on holiday. It seemed strange at the time since I wasn't doing any computer work. From that point on it slowly progressed, eventually leading to a climax by the summer. The worst I remember it getting was when both hands felt swollen, tight, the tendons are clicking, every joint in my hands and fingers creaked as it resisted any movement. My hands would burn when I tried to move them. I had absolutely no strength in either hand at this point. I could only hold a mug by "cupping" it with my palms, holding it by the handle was impossible. At this point typing was absolutely excruciating and out of the question.

The Cope

In order to rest my hands, I started to use voice control software to control my computer. The software is called Talon and was actually a lot better than I thought it was going to be, especially since my workflow heavily relies on keyboard shortcuts. Alas, this is not an article on Talon so I will speak no more of it.

Although reasonably effective, voice control software is still quite frustrating to use and sometimes made me question my own sanity. After using it for a while, at some point my voice would go hoarse and it would be painful for me speak... Now what ?

kailh box pink

I then began to think about how I could get back to using my keyboard despite the incredible hand pain. I did some research and found that the softest switches I could get for my keyboard were the Kailh Box Silent Pink switches, which only require 35 grams of force to activate. However even after putting these switches in my keyboard it was still far too painful for me to use. That's when I started researching if there were any kind of lighter switches...

stenograph machine

After much research online I found people talking about stenography machines. These are the special kind of keyboards used by typists in court rooms to produce transcripts. Because stenograph operators need to be able to transcribe speech in real time, they use special keys that are extremely light to push down, much lighter than even the lightest standard keyboard switches. I found out that a similarly light switch can be achieved by replacing the standard springs within the kailh pink switches with the stenograph key springs which require only 20 grams of force required to activate. This made typing significantly easier although my pain level was still very high.

kailh box pink parts

The Fear

Something in my hands must have been fundamentally damaged. I had overused them and now they had sustained a grave injury. I'd better not use them much for anything now, rest is what they needed. I took around 6 weeks off to go on another holiday, I thought that a summer holiday free from any computer use would be just the ticket. It was during this time that I developed a different kind of pain. I had developed this very tender spot on the inside of my right hand, between the middle and ring fingers. I first noticed it one day while I was washing my hands.

weird sensation on inside of right hand

Whenever it was touched it gave me a strange numbing/pain that radiated out to the rest of my hand, making me flinch. The thing that would trigger it most though would be the sensation of water against it. So for example, when turning on the shower I would check the temperature by putting my hand into the stream of water, this would be a very strong trigger.

some time later

Alas, my 6 weeks of rest had come to a conclusion. I hadn't done any typing or even computer use in that time, surely there must have been some healing that happened during that time...

I sit down at my laptop to write this note. Here goes nothing, I gingerly apply pressure to the featherlight keys on my laptop, and...
... instant pain.
It emanates from my fingertip and courses its way through every nerve up to the base of my palm.
wtf...
How is this possible?
Seriously?
Literally no improvement after taking all that rest???

This made no sense. The only reasonable conclusion I could draw was that damage was permanent and no amount of rest would help it heal... Still, I thought I would at least get some kind of pain reduction.

The Desperation

At this point I had no idea what to do. I tried resting for a long time and there was no recovery, instead there was actually more pain. I thought to myself, "I can't be the only software engineer experiencing this" and so, I started looking in the place where the world's software engineers all congregate. Hacker news. I remember coming across some mentions of one "Dr. Sarno" and his books. My first thought was, "oh its probably just another guy with a chiropractor degree calling himself a doctor", as is my cynical nature. But thought to myself "what the hell, I'm desperate AF" and decided to carry on anyways...

Happily, on closer inspection it seemed that this Sarno guy was legit. I instantly ordered a hardback³ copy of The Mind Body Prescription - John Sarno

The mind body prescription

I read the whole thing over a couple of days and instantly something started to change. It was so subtle that I scarcely believed it myself. The pain was about 1% more bearable. It was such a slight difference that I didn't trust my own perceptions.
Its probably just wishful thinking/placebo.

I didn't dare to get my hopes up.

Is This Real?

But like the book recommended, I began to read and reread each section, trying to absorb all the information that was on each page. I reread the success stories section and really tried to devote my attention fully to the book as I read it.

The pain continued to recede.

This can't be real, can it?
Is the act of a reading a book actually somehow reducing my pain?
Isn't it just because the act of reading is kind of relaxing?
Am I just bullshitting myself somehow and my pain hasn't actually changed?

The Cure

As recommended by the book, I started to try and use my hands as I did before the pain set in. Instead of treating them like they were made out of wet tissue paper, I started to try and perform all of the actions that I used to do previously. This was very hard. Every time I picked up a cup there was this combination of excruciating pain and fear, "wtf are you doing? your body is telling you that you are in pain!? why are you not stopping?!" this thought would ring deafeningly in my mind before, after, and during any kind of action I performed with my hands. However, I was desperate enough to continue, my hands were already so bad that I wasn't risking much by trying this in the case that I damaged them further.

I started typing again, this time using the original pink switches. It was painful but I could feel it getting slightly better every day. After another few weeks I tried a harder switch (an extra 10 grams of activation force), and again I was slowly able to progress.

Fast forward 3 months and the pain had reduced by about 80% I could do most things just about fine, including typing.

The Mechanism

According to Dr. Sarno, many types of chronic pain are not caused by any kind of physical abnormality or tissue damage. Instead it is attributed to what he calls "unconscious repressed rage". How does that cause pain you ask? The theory goes that the unconscious mind will repress emotions in order to protect the conscious part of it⁴ from experiencing them. It will instead distract you by creating the sensation of pain. He calls this TMS⁵.

Yes you read that correctly. According to Sarno, there was no damage to my hands, the pain was caused by my mind.

I'll just let that sink in...

Yeah...

So as you can imagine that is a little bit of a hard pill to swallow. And to be honest at this point I was not really a 100% onboard with the whole repressed unconscious rage thing...

I mean really?
Do I really have all this pent up rage within me?
I'd like to think that I didn't, but how can I be sure when its all unconscious?

I will expand more on the mechanism later on, but before that there is more to my story.

The Relapse

So my recovery kind of stopped at getting 80% better. The last 20% of the pain remained, along with that weird sensation on my palm. This was the state of play all the way until the end of 2024, when my symptoms suddenly worsened again to the point that I couldn't even hold a fork.

It's over

It was so sudden and dramatic that it made me doubt myself. It made me think that the partial healing I had experienced before wasn't real, it made me think that I had just brainwashed myself and actually there is something structurally wrong with my hands. I began to despair. I started researching again. I started looking at all these hand exercises I could try to help with the pain. I started trying to squeeze a stress ball to improve the muscles in my hands.

This made all my pain much worse. I started spending a lot of time on places like the subreddit for carpal tunnel syndrome. Then I started wearing wrist braces to prevent my wrists from bending and causing further damage. I became obsessed with comparing my hands to other people's to see if they looked any different. I started thinking that my hand muscles had irreversibly wasted away and I would never return to doing normal activities even if the surgery worked.

After being on that subreddit for a while I concluded that my situation was hopeless, surgery would be the only option, and even then it did not guarantee a sustained recovery. As you can imagine, this thought was quite depressing.

IT'S SO OVER

I was now firmly back in the catastrophizing stage of my journey. I started questioning everything.

Why did I bother becoming a software engineer?
Why did I study computer science at university?

But why stop there? Every single life decision was now up for grabs!

Everything I ever did was wrong...
I'm a fuckup...

The Turning Point

This is when I decided to have another look at some of Dr. Sarno's work, just for the hell of it. "I may as well try his technique again, I have no other choice". But this time instead of just rereading the book of his I had, I did some more research and found the TMS forum. This is where fellow sufferers come to ask questions and help others. I realised that there is actually a lot more out there than Dr. Sarno's work, the field has advanced since his day. I started looking on the forum for success stories involving hand pain / RSI / Carpal Tunnel. And immediately, just like before, I could feel something changing in my hands whilst I read along. It wasn't as if it instantly got better or the pain just went away, but there was certainly a different quality of the sensation I was experiencing, there was a "lightness" is how I would describe it. So I dared to dream, what if this could work again, and not just work again, maybe I could make some more sustainable changes to my life that allowed me to experience less pain for the foreseeable future too...

so-over-so-back

We're back

So I bought a bunch more modern books⁶ and did some more research. It seemed that some people require therapy in order to fully heal from TMS. I was becoming aware that besides just reducing my pain symptoms, there needed to be some change to my psyche if I wanted to have a long lasting recovery. This lead me to researching TMS practitioners in my area using the TMS wiki. Unfortunately the website seems quite old and unmaintained, so I didn't have much hope of finding someone. Thats when I discovered that there is an organisation in the UK called SIRPA that do a similar thing. There is even a map that you can use to find someone local to you.

WE'RE SO BACK

In January 2025 I booked a call with a practitioner I found through the SIRPA website and never looked back. For the first time I was able to talk to someone face to face and get some reassurance that this is actually real!⁷ . Unfortunately most people are still not aware of the very clear relationship between mind and body ⁸ so when I try to tell friends & family about the concept I can sometimes see the fear in their eyes that I have lost it. To be fair, even I thought I had lost it for a while... Working with someone who knows what they are doing can make all the difference. There is only so much one can do by reading books/articles alone. It can be enough to get the ball rolling, but for me, I needed someone to quell my overthinking and reassure me that I was on the right path.

Fast forward 3 months... My hands are 90% better and that weird thing on the palm of my hand that I couldn't get rid off before is finally gone! Better yet, other problems that I had have also disappeared. For example, I had an intolerance to gluten that started when I was in university, but now I have no problem eating it at all! This was nothing short of a miracle for me! Needless to say my life has been changed and I ain't ever going back.

It is still however a ongoing process. My pain has not disappeared without a trace. Its still present in certain situations albeit much diminished in intensity. I don't think it is wise or even desirable to make a goal to completely and indefinitely rid oneself of pain. I think the pain acts as a messenger from your body and your unconscious. The intensity of the message can vary greatly, it might be a text message, it might be a fire alarm. Either way it is an invitation to engage with parts of oneself that may not have been given the attention they require. To have the explicit goal to eliminate pain would be to shoot the messenger, which does not go down well in my experience.

What was really going on

The purpose of pain

To understand it simply we can go back to first principles. What purpose does pain serve? Well, usually it tells you that you are in danger of harming your body if you carry on doing what you are doing. For example, you take something out of the oven and the mittens are not quite thick enough. Ouch! You feel the heat through the mittens and have to frantically put the rice pudding down on the work surface to avoid burning yourself.
Ok makes sense.
The pain has definitely served its purpose here.

How this relates to RSI

But what has this got to do with the pain I had?

At the time of my pain there were various stressful events going on in my life, some work related, some not. Working was probably the most obvious constant pressure going on. However, I did not do anything about this stress. I had not even noticed it creep up on me. I was putting my body through a really hard time and I was not listening to it. The body does not like being pumped full of adrenaline and being pushed to the extreme all the time. It is not designed for it. But as I was experiencing chronic stress, that is exactly what the body was subjected to.

My body eventually came to conclusion that it was in danger (fair enough), the fight or flight response was constantly being activated without an end in sight. Since from its perspective, work === stress === danger, it needed to get me to stop working. Since I am a programmer, my job relies heavily on using the keyboard. So, all it needed to do was to make my hands hurt so much that I couldn't use the keyboard anymore and then I would be prevented from working, thus eliminating the "danger". The body has an incredible intelligence and logically chose my hands as the area of my body to experience pain.

Ok, so how come when I took a break from work it didn't get better?

Because I was not aware of the mechanism at the time, I believed that my hands were hurting because they had been physically damaged. That is of course a very fearful thought. As I mentioned earlier, fear is the emotion who's purpose is to help us avoid danger. So from the body's perspective, I was still in danger. So what reason would there be to let my pain go away?

How did I get better?

First of all I needed to acknowledge what my body was trying to tell me all along. Every person experiences stress in their life in one form of another. This can be from interpersonal relationships, finances, illness etc, its not something that can be escaped. The existence of stress is not in and of itself the problem. The problem was that I was not dealing with the stress I was experiencing in a healthy way.

I was not properly "feeling" my emotions. Its easy to rationalise away why you shouldn't be feeling a certain way because of xyz instead of just accepting reality and surrendering to the feeling. It takes time to gain familiarity with the body and to correctly interpret its feelings and to give it space to process emotions. I realised that I was unknowingly repressing emotions instead of dealing with them there and then. No wonder my body was crying out for attention. I needed to teach my body that it was not in danger. That there was no need to be fearful, and that there was nothing structurally wrong with my hands. As you can imagine this was not easy. It took a lot of time and courage. In the end however I was able to get to a place where I am now. I have developed a better relationship with my body and hope that I can continue to live symptom free for the rest of my life.

In terms of the exact exercises I did, I will not elaborate too much as there are great educational resources out there already. For example:

This article has been pretty long winded but this was my intention all along. If I ever relapse again I will come back here and reread it all and relive every moment. I don't ever want to doubt myself again...