Raynaud’s disease by Irralee Andrzejowska – Part 1

What is Raynaud’s disease?      

Raynaud’s (ray-NOSE) disease causes fingers and toes to feel painful and numb and change colour in response to exposure to cold temperatures. A normal autonomic nervous system (ANS) response to cold is for the capillaries in our hands and feet to vasoconstrict to prioritize circulation and heat to our vital organs, resulting in cold hands and feet. However, in Raynaud’s disease, the vasospasm response to cold is excessive, and causes significant pain and numbness and colour changes due to temporary ischaemia.  As you warm up and your circulation improves, the affected areas may turn red, throb, tingle or swell. It is also recognised that emotional stress and anxiety can trigger an episode with mild cold exposure.

Despite its name, Raynaud’s disease is not caused by a pathogen or disease process and its cause is considered to be ‘medically unexplained’. It is more common in women, and having a close relative with the disease appears to increase your risk. For a lot of people, it is mild, and they do not seek treatment. It is considered to be incurable by the medical profession, but the symptoms can be managed with medication and wearing extra warm layers when exposed to cold conditions.

Secondary Raynaud’s or Reynaud’s phenomenon, which is less common, is often more serious and is associated with an underlying condition such as lupus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis and Sjogren’s syndrome as they effect the capillaries to the skin. Smoking can also be a risk factor due to the deleterious effects on blood vessels

My experience of Raynaud’s disease

Two winters ago, we were skiing with a friend who also suffers with Raynaud’s disease. As you could imagine, the worst time for the painful symptoms is whilst sitting on the chair lifts. He managed it by taking nifedipine, which is a vasodilator used to treat high blood pressure. So, I took one of his tablets, and I had the most enjoyable day skiing because, for the first time, I didn’t have painful hands and feet. However, I wasn’t prepared to take a drug every time I was exposed to the cold, because of potential undesirable side effects. The drug treats the symptoms but does not address the cause and therefore is not curative.

One winter ago, I was learning about the advances in the neuroscience understanding of pain and I had recently started the SIRPA training. I was fascinated to learn about the neural pathway link between emotional memory and the autonomic nervous system. According to Dr Sarno, in his book The Mindbody Prescription, Raynaud’s “is a psychologically induced overreaction to the autonomic system’s normal response to cold…another example of hyperactivity of the autonomic nervous system in response to emotional stimuli” (p113.) This gave me hope that maybe there was a possibility of a cure after all. I was therefore keen to try the mind body principles I was learning about on my own body.

Around this time in February 2020, my husband put his cold hands on my ribcage, (which amuses him as I have a huge reaction to this!) and I shouted out, ‘Don’t do that I hate the cold!’ Aahhh, there it was. This lightbulb moment, when it occurred to me that maybe this over-reaction emotionally to the cold had something to do with the over-reaction of my ANS.

Well, now I was excited!  Consciously I did not want the symptoms of course but, over the years, wishful thinking, repeated exposure despite the symptoms and trying to ignore it was not the answer. In fact, my symptoms were gradually worsening. It now seemed clear to me that this reaction was imbedded in a subconscious nervous system program and that was why it couldn’t be resolved by my conscious thoughts.

Why the condition persisted

The role of our nervous system is to protect us from danger, whether that be physical, emotional, psychological or social, in order that we can survive. At some point during my younger years, I now considered the possibility that my nervous system had had an experience which ‘taught’ it that being exposed to the cold was dangerous for me, emotionally, because I certainly hadn’t been exposed to physically dangerous levels of cold in Australia! By making it really painful to be in the cold, it was trying to modify my behaviour so that I avoided it. I realized my nervous system was producing these painful symptoms to ‘protect me’ from cold as it perceived that it was dangerous for me.

This was an over-reaction as far as the body goes, as the amount of cold I am exposed to in these activities is not enough for tissue damage. I needed to look deeper, for the priming emotional event to discover when and why my nervous system learned to protect me from feeling the cold. Some event had initialed this response, and then the symptoms continued to be reinforced every time I had a painful exposure to cold conditions, due to strengthening of learned neural pathways. This meant I needed to look for, and resolve, the root cause rather than using nifedipine, which just temporarily treats the symptoms. I realized that if I could work this out, I had a chance of reprogramming my nervous system back to a normal cold response that wasn’t overly sensitive.

Well, in one week we were due to meet with friends in the Lake District to go walking, and cold weather was predicted, so this was a great incentive to work on this theory and put it to the test. So, after my lightbulb moment, I immediately asked myself the question as to why I hated the cold so much. To my surprise, straight away, a memory popped up of the first time I remembered experiencing the cold, and this is where I discovered the root cause of my problem.

The priming event

Growing up in Brisbane, it is fair to say I had never been exposed to the cold, except for ice cubes in my soft drinks! However, when I was about 8 years old, our family went on a summer holiday to the Snowy Mountains (Australians don’t beat about the bush when they name places) near Canberra. There was still some ice on the slopes, and I can remember being very excited to see ‘snow’. I must have been going on about it, so my Dad thought it would be funny to push me down the slope in my jeans. I can still recall this sensation of a cold, numb bum as I slid down the slope, screaming all the way. Well, nothing too emotional about that you may think, and I agree, but it is what happened next which was key I believe.

We were sight-seeing for the day, and I didn’t have a change of clothes with me, so I had to walk around in public with wet trousers. I was uncomfortable, cold, very embarrassed, and self-conscious. I can remember my younger brother teasing me, because it looked as though I had peed my pants. I think it was these very uncomfortable emotions and ridicule which my nervous system has since been trying to protect me from feeling, as it associated them with the cold. So, I became wired to hate the cold, and my nervous system was doing its best to make it unpleasant so that I might avoid exposing myself to it in order not to experience these uncomfortable emotions again.

It wasn’t until I was 21, when I went skiing in Australia for the first time, that I was exposed to the cold again and I had some pain in my hands and feet. I thought this was probably normal and I put it down to my

cheap gloves and socks. After I moved to England, I was exposed much more often during my winter sporting activities and I was resigned to painful hands and feet, despite now being able

to afford better equipment. Each experience reinforced how I hated the cold, because of the pain, and so the cycle continued.

Raynaud’s disease Blog Part 2 click here:

About Irralee:

Having worked with clients with musculoskeletal pain in the private sector for 25 years, my practice has been revolutionised following training with SIRPA and implementing the mind-body approach to the treatment of pain. I am passionate about this holistic approach. If you would like to know more, please contact me via email so we can arrange a free 30 minute call to answer your questions and to see if this approach is what you are looking for.