Empowered Yogi Podcast

Yoga for Low Back Pain Relief: How Stress and the Protectometer Affect Chronic Pain

• Season 1 • Episode 4

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Are stress and unprocessed emotions secretly fueling your low back pain? In this episode, physiotherapist and yoga therapist Cathy Aganoff explains how your brain’s protectometer, its built-in threat detector links stress, chronic pain, and the nervous system. Discover how yoga therapy offers powerful tools to release stored stress, retrain your nervous system, and reclaim safety in your body.

Drawing on both neuroscience and yoga philosophy, Cathy shares:

  • Why stress and stored emotions often show up as tension and pain in the low back and hips.
  • How your nervous system “learns” pain after months of chronic stress.
  • The difference between band-aid fixes (like simply cutting back your to-do list) and true nervous system retraining.
  • Practical yoga therapy tools, breathwork, gentle rhythmic movement, strength training, affirmations, and meditation, to help you discharge stress, calm your protectometer, and feel safe in your body again.

If you’ve ever noticed your back pain flare during times of overwhelm, or wondered why rest alone doesn’t fix the problem, this episode will give you fresh insight into the stress–pain connection. You’ll also hear Cathy’s personal story of heartbreak and chronic back pain, and how yoga became the missing piece in her healing.

👉 Key takeaway: Safety is the real medicine. By processing stress and building resilience through yoga, you can retrain your nervous system and reclaim comfort in your body.

Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode

Thanks for listening. If you’re ready to break free from the injury-recovery cycle and future-proof your yoga practice, hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you find value here, please scroll down and leave a 5 star review. It helps more yogis like you discover this work.

The best place to connect with me is over on my insta. You can DM me there @cathys_yogajournal. I'd love to know any aha moments you had from this episode. It helps me to know what's resonating with you and how to serve you better.

SPEAKER_00:

What if I told you that your stress response could be directly fueling your low back pain? And that it's not just about lifting heavy things or moving the wrong way, but that your very thoughts and emotions could be turning up the volume on your pain. In this episode, I'm putting on my physiotherapist and yoga therapist hats to explain how your brain's threat detector, what I call your protectometer, links stress and pain. And most importantly, I'll share how yoga can become one of the most powerful tools you have to calm this system, process stored stress, and reclaim safety in your body. Welcome to the Empowered Yogi Podcast, where movement and neuroscience meets yoga and spirituality. I'm Kathy Akinov, physiotherapist and yoga teacher, with over 20 years of experience in helping yoga lovers overcome injuries and reclaim their yoga practice and last time. I'm here to share with you my most valuable teaching to help you get off that recurring injury hempster wheel and get back to thriving on the mat. Let me ask you this. Have you ever noticed that your back pain seems to get worse when you're stressed out? Even if you haven't done anything physically demanding. Maybe you've been rushing to make a deadline, had an argument with someone you love, or simply felt overwhelmed, and suddenly your low back tightens up, leaving you wondering what just happened. That used to be me. Back in 2015, during the most emotionally stressful time of my life, the breakup of my long-term relationship, I also experienced chronic low back pain. And not surprisingly, the year of my biggest heartbreak and emotional upheaval of my life was also the year my low back was the most painful. Here's the truth. Stress is one of the biggest culprits behind many chronic health conditions. And when it comes to pain, your brain has a built-in threat detector. I call it your protectometer. I believe this term was originally coined by neuroscientist and physio Lorimer Mosley, who was a well-known researcher in the area of pain from the same university that I studied at and was one of my lecturers back in the day. But this protectometer is not a single anatomical brain part. It's a term that describes the process for how different regions of your brain work together to detect threats. The protectometer doesn't just register physical threats like lifting your toddler or grandkids and straining your back. It also registers your thoughts and emotions as potential threats. So whether you're worrying about your back, stressing about work, or rushing to appointments, your protectometer can amplify your pain signals as a way to make you pay attention. Pain in this context is less about damage and more about perceived danger. When I went through my breakup, yoga philosophy would say that my pain was connected to my root chakra, the energy center tied to safety, security, and belonging. I felt like I'd lost my home, my foundation, and that survival stress got trapped in my low back and hips. Yoga philosophy explains it as stuck energy. Neuroscience explains it as an overactive threat detection system. Both perspectives agree. Stress lives in the body if it isn't processed and released. And here's something important. It doesn't always take a huge trauma. Sometimes it's the accumulation of little T traumas, being criticized as a child, feeling rejected, not feeling safe to fully express yourself. Over time, this survival stress builds up like emotional debris. Think of it like your computer hard drive. If you never delete old files or organize your downloads, your system clogs with junk. Eventually it slows down, glitches, and throws error messages. Chronic pain is one of those error messages. So we have to process and release it. Other animals in the animal kingdom do this much better than we do. You can probably picture a duck or a deer in the wild escaping a predator. They literally do a Taylor Swift in response to the haters and shake it off. They discharge the stress hormones and muscular tension from their fight or flight response, allowing their nervous system to reset and return to a calm state without developing chronic stress. The thing that I think happens so often is that our modern lifestyle, and this was me too, this hectic pace that we live our lives in conditions us to disconnect from our body so much that we don't even realize that we're carrying all this heaviness and fatigue and emotional debris in our bodies. And because we have been conditioned by these emotions over time, we start to confuse them as being just us. We don't recognize those emotions as like hitchhikers that have hijacked our nervous system temporarily and then they move on. Not that anyone does this anymore, it seems like an insane thing to do, but it's kind of like picking up an annoying hitchhiker. And rather than dropping them off in the next town, we just stuff them in the boot and forget that they're there. Every now and then they yell out and thump the boot and make the ride uncomfortable. That analogy felt a little creepy. I don't know how my brain came up with that one. Sorry for the creepy serial killer vibes. But all this is to say, if you don't have a skillful practice for processing and discharging stress, this e-motion, this energy in motion, gets stuck and ends up being stored in the body's tissues. Now here's the kicker. After about three months of ongoing pain, your brain starts to memorize pain. Just like learning a piano piece or flowing through sun salutations without thinking, your brain creates a pain map. So even if the original tissue damage has healed, your brain keeps firing off the pain signal because it learned to. You see, that's why so many people struggle with boom and bust cycles of stress. Just like pain, it becomes a learned and practiced neural pathway. I think we all fall into this trap sometimes, maybe you too, where you think, I just need to cut out my stress. Like I just need to do less. If I stop overcommitting to things, everything will be much better. That's why I'm always stressed. I'm just doing too much. And it's tempting to fall on this strategy as a fix for your chronic stress. But and now if you've been listening to this podcast so far or you've followed me on social media, you'll know my thing is my message is all about moving beyond band-aid solutions to healing. This is the empowered yogi podcast, not the pampered yogi podcast. And that's really what this is. Reducing your stress by cutting things from your to-do list might make you feel less stressed. And by all means do that. I mean, anything that reduces your stress is a really good thing. And often you do need to do that when you reach a threshold of stress and overwhelm. But what I'm saying is that doing this isn't really addressing the root cause issue. It's just putting a band-aid over it. One of my favorite yoga quotes that speaks to this teaching is to live like the lotus at home in the muddy water. Which means that through established practice of yoga, we can become so resilient and healthy in our nervous system that no matter what's going on outside, no matter what conditions you are facing in your life, back pain, kids not listening and running amok, work deadlines looming, things just generally not going to plan. Despite all of these challenges, you are good. You just flow. That doesn't mean that you don't feel your feelings and get upset or angry, but you have a healthy processing mechanism to process and release all of that fight-flight energy. That's why we need to retrain the nervous system. And there are two main approaches. Firstly, bottom-up, which uses the body to calm the brain, and top-down using the mind to calm the body. Both are essential, and both these strategies are being practiced every time we come to the map to do yoga. So that's good news. So bottom-up includes things like strength training and gentle rhythmical movement, and things like breath work, using the body. Strengthening your low back and core is like reinforcing the foundation of a house. Once the base is rock solid, your brain gets undeniable proof that the structure can handle more weight. Or think of it like presenting evidence in court. The jury is your nervous system, and once it sees the evidence, it rules in favor of safety and movement. But it's not just about strength, it's also about gentle, soothing movement. Movements like cat and cow send rhythmical signals of safety to the nervous system. It's like rocking a baby to sleep, reminding the brain that movement can be soothing, not dangerous. Top down starts with our thoughts. And the first step is simply gratitude for your nervous system. Because when you beat yourself up for reacting to things, you're like someone yelling at a smoke alarm for going off. It's only doing its job. Instead, thank it and then gently reassure it that the kitchen isn't on fire. When you meet your nervous system with gratitude, you soften resistance. That makes space for affirmations and new beliefs about your safety to land. But here's the key: you can't just repeat affirmations in a rushed logical state. You need to slow down your brain waves. It's like waiting for a drawbridge to lower. You can't cross into the garden of your subconscious until the bridge comes down. That's why I use practices like breath work, pranayama, meditation, and something I call mind movies, short visual affirmations designed to bypass the logical brain and plant new seeds of belief where they can actually grow. So here's the bigger picture. As yogis, we already have the tools. Every time you meet discomfort on the mat with patience, compassion, and presence, you're building resilience. You're training your nervous system not to disconnect, but to stay with sensation and allow stress to be processed. This is how stored stress gets metabolized instead of hoarded. Over time, as your system acclimates, you start to feel safer in your body. And that sense of safety is what allows your protectometer to dial down your pain signals. Safety is the medicine. So I hope you're seeing here that the experience of safety has many contexts. Part of healing my chronic back pain involved coming face to face with some of my most wounded parts and learning to be with them with compassion and sending them the love that they needed, but maybe didn't receive in those moments when they were wounded. One of these contexts of training my nervous system to feel safe was around a fear of exposure. This often comes from excessive criticism and judgment and feelings of shame during childhood that make you feel unsafe to speak up and express your true self. And I've reflected on this many times. The call to teach yoga, and I'm starting to see now also another layer of this is the call to start a podcast, is tied up with this pull to heal that part, to heal my own fear of exposure. Despite all of my experiences, I think one thing that I'm really proud of myself for is that although I feel all these feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, I've never let them stop me from following a deeper calling. My curiosity about what's possible has always won out over my self-doubt. And so I share this with you to hopefully show you that it's not my safe space to be this open, and I'm not usually the type to be an overshout. And I'm not usually the type to be an oversharer. If you've attended my yoga classes in the studio or online, you may have noticed this about me. I'm usually more focused on my students and what they are going through. I'd like to say it's because I'm being selfless and giving, but if I'm totally honest, subconsciously I think my nervous system feels safer that way. Because sharing about myself may trigger my fear of exposure. So I'm hoping that by me sharing this and opening up about my own journey, that you are starting to see that conditions like low back pain are rarely purely about managing physical load. If we were all humanoid robots, maybe that would be true. And maybe one day soon that will be true, scary thought. You are a complex, multidimensional being with thoughts, emotions, and a physical body. You're not just the meat suit that you wear. And your brain's protectometer is responding to all of these layers. And that's why as soon as I really began to understand myself in this expanded way and the relationship between the mind and the body, I could never go back to a mainstream model of treating injuries in a traditional physio clinic. You may have heard the saying, no better, do better. When I didn't know better, I didn't know. I'm really sorry and ashamed to say this because this was a very young, inexperienced version of myself so fresh out of uni, and no like experience or understanding of the inner workings of a human being other than the anatomical and physiological. Despite being taught at uni about chronic pain processing in the brain, I lacked an experiential knowledge of this truth. And I thought that anyone who had chronic pain was making it up for attention. Gasp. But now I know better, and now I hope I also do better. And the framework of knowledge and skill that really helped me to develop this deeper, more attuned understanding was yoga. So I'm eternally grateful for the teachings of yoga and the transformative power that they've had not just on my personal life and body, but my professional life too. If you've had any aha moments from today's episode, I'd love to know. Otherwise, I literally have no idea if what I'm sharing is resonating. Send me a DM on Instagram or an email. I'd love to start a conversation with you there. And if this episode has spoken to you, please rate this podcast five stars and leave a written review. That's the best way that you can support this show and help other yoga lovers like you find it. Click the link in the show notes to download a document with today's key takeaway and mantra. In this document, you'll find not just today's mantra, but all the mantras from past episodes. Perfect for your phone wallpaper or your journal. Rewriting them is a powerful way to anchor new beliefs. Here's today's mantra. Despite the pain I feel, my body is safe. I am safe. I thank my nervous system for doing its job properly and remind it that I am okay. I want to leave you with a question to ponder. Should you rest from your yoga practice to help heal your low back pain? We'll explore that in the next episode. Thanks for being here, and I'm so excited to continue this journey with you. Help us today.