How to Cope with Chronic Pain: Choosing Life Daily

If you live with chronic pain, you know it’s not just about your body hurting, it’s about waking up each day to a battle you didn’t sign up for. For years I fought against pain like it was an enemy I could conquer. But eventually, I learned a different truth: coping isn’t about defeating pain. It’s about choosing life, over and over, even when it feels impossible.

This article is my story of how to cope with chronic pain. The small rituals, the mindset shifts, and the stubborn hope that carry me forward.

Winter in My Bones

Winter is always the hardest. The cold seeps deep, past the surface, past the muscles, all the way into my bones. Arthritis isn’t just stiffness; it’s the kind of weight that makes you feel like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, joints in need of oil just to keep moving.

Sleep doesn’t come easy in winter. I crank the heat in my home to ease the stiffness, but that isn’t sustainable, not for my wallet and not for the environment. So I suffer through it, learning to live in that tension between comfort and necessity.

I remember walking my husky dogs, Sage and Sky, one winter day. My body was achy and sore, but they forced me out the door. That’s the perk of dogs – responsibility means movement, even when you don’t want to. I can still hear the crunch of snow under my boots, every step a mix of pain and persistence.

Another night, I remember resting in bed and realizing I was hungry. The simple act of walking down the stairs to the kitchen took much longer than it should have. Each step was deliberate, stiff, heavy, like I was learning to walk again after surgery. It was humbling. Pain has a way of making even the most ordinary tasks feel extraordinary, and not in a good way.

That’s when I wrote a poem, my way of expressing what words in conversation couldn’t carry. A few raw lines about winter locking my bones in ice. I shared it with my family so they could understand what I was carrying inside. For a moment, I felt less alone.

The Cost of Fighting Pain

For years, I treated pain like a war I had to win. Push harder. Outwork it. Refuse to give in. That was my default setting in my twenties, when grit felt like the only option.

I remember one night vividly. I was running my painting company while in school. Snow was supposed to fall heavy that evening, and the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. After a two-hour lecture, I limped to my car. My hips ached from sitting, my joints grinding like they needed oil.

The car barely warmed up on the drive home. I worried it might freeze over before I got there. The day before, I’d worked a fourteen-hour shift on ladders, my body wrung out like a rag. Painting was fun and I often treated it like a workout, up and down ladders, bending, squatting. Outwardly, I pretended to be normal. But in my quiet moments with brush in hand, I felt far from it.

That night, driving home in silence, I felt like I was walking a razor’s edge: too young to admit I was struggling, too proud to slow down, too stubborn to accept that pain was already shaping my future.

Pain doesn’t negotiate. It’s a tsunami. It sweeps away your grit, your plans, your willpower. And the harder I fought, the more it broke me.

Choosing Life Anyway

So how do you cope with chronic pain when fighting it only breaks you further? In my darkest moments, and they still happen, pain screams so loud it drowns out everything else. It’s like being stuck in a violent storm with no way out.

Medication helps, but it doesn’t silence the storm. On days when I succumb to defeat, I fall back on something deeper: gratitude. I’ve learned that gratitude can shrink the world, reduce the noise, and bring me back to the simplest truth, my breath.

I choose to hear it.
I choose to live.
That’s always been my bottom line.

It wasn’t always this way. After a toxic relationship in my early thirties, it took me six months to baseline my energy back to something like normal. When I finally felt myself again, I remember saying out loud, “I haven’t been this happy in consecutive weeks for years.” My pain felt lighter, my body calmer. That was the season I truly discovered gratitude, not as a buzzword, but as a lifeline.

From that anchor, I built small rituals that still help me move forward:

Daily Rituals That Ground Me

A dose of omega fish oils in liquid form for inflammation and a quiet sense of mobility.
Vitamin D3 + K2 to keep my bones and mood steady, especially in the dark winters.
Magnesium glycinate before bed, easing restless nights when my body buzzes like static.
B12 for energy, because chronic pain drains reserves you don’t even realize you’ve spent.
Stepping outside, even if only for five minutes, to breathe in the air and remind myself that life continues around me.

None of these erase pain. But stacked together, they build a bridge from one moment to the next.

From War to Partnership

The biggest shift in learning how to cope with chronic pain was moving from war to partnership.

Three years ago, I injured my shoulder playing hockey. Movement has always been my medicine, and I wasn’t going to let pain take it all away. But the fall was brutal, I hit the edge of my skate, tumbled backwards, and felt a sharp, unfamiliar pain that’s never fully healed. To this day, it still lingers.

When I finally went to physiotherapy, my therapist looked at me and said something I’ll never forget: “Respect the pain.”

He was referring to my shoulder, but it applied to my entire body.

It struck me because I’d never thought of it that way. For years, I either ignored pain or fought against it. But respect? That’s different. Respect means listening, pacing, adjusting. Respect means setting boundaries like I wrote about here instead of pretending I can push forever.

Pain is a partner I didn’t choose. But if I don’t respect it, it wins. And I refuse to let it win.

What I’d Tell You

Pain will test you. It will challenge your body, your mind, your will. But in every moment, you have the chance to choose life in simple, stubborn ways.

If you’re reading this and carrying your own pain (whatever form it takes), know this: the rituals don’t have to be big. Gratitude. A breath. A song. A vitamin. A five-minute walk. They’re not cures, but they’re lifelines.

And if you’re someone supporting a loved one in pain, remember: your presence matters more than solutions. The small acts like a warm meal, a kind word, just sitting beside them, these are lifelines too.

I’ll never say this path is easy. But I can tell you this: choosing life, over and over, is worth it.

So let me leave you with a question:

What’s one simple way you can choose life today?