Your MRI Is Not Your Sentence: What Viktor Frankl Understood About Back Pain
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Frankl wrote that about surviving conditions no one would choose. But the principle reaches further than the circumstances that produced it — including into something as ordinary as a sore back, or as unsettling as an MRI for back pain report full of words you don’t recognize.
Because here is what most people are never told: when you cannot change the structure of your spine, you can still change how your body lives with it.
The Two Scans That Don't Make Sense
Imagine two people.
The first has a clear MRI. Clean discs, no degeneration, nothing a radiologist would circle. And yet some mornings they can barely get out of bed.
The second has a disc herniation visible on the scan, the kind of image that looks alarming on a screen. And yet they move through their day without a second thought.
This isn’t a rare exception. It’s one of the most consistent and uncomfortable findings in MRI for back pain research: what shows up on an image and what a person actually feels often don’t line up. Studies that scan people without any back pain routinely find disc bulges, degeneration, and protrusions in a large share of them. The damage is there. The pain isn’t.
Research from spine biomechanics labs, including the work behind the methods we build our programs on, developed at Dr. Stuart McGill’s laboratory at the University of Waterloo, points to the same conclusion from the other direction: how you load and move your spine throughout the day often matters more for how it feels than what a single snapshot shows.
Why the Picture Isn't the Whole Story
An MRI for back pain is a photograph. It captures one frozen moment of anatomy.
But your spine isn’t a photograph; it’s something you use thousands of times a day. Every time you bend, lift, twist, sit, and stand, you’re either loading it in a way it tolerates well, or in a way it doesn’t.
That daily pattern of movement is not fixed. The image might be. The behaviour around it isn’t.
This is the quiet shift that changes everything: you may not be able to negotiate with the scan, but you can change the strategy your body uses around it.
What Your MRI for Back Pain Really Means
If you’ve been handed an MRI for back pain report full of words like protrusion, degeneration, or desiccation, it’s easy to read it as a verdict — proof that your back is broken and the rest of your life will be spent managing the damage.
It isn’t a verdict. It’s information about the structure. And structure is only one part of the equation.
The part you can work on is function: how you move, how you build tolerance, how you stop loading your spine in ways that provoke it, and how you start loading it in ways it can handle.
That work doesn’t erase what’s on the scan. It changes what the scan means for your daily life.
Frankl’s line was never about pretending the situation is fine. It’s about identifying what you can still influence when part of the picture is fixed.
Your spine may have limits you didn’t choose. What you do with it, most days, is still yours.
Where to Start
Changing how your spine handles daily life doesn’t begin with a grand plan. It begins with a few movements done consistently.
We put together five simple movements you can begin today, the same foundational patterns we use at the start of our programs to help the body build tolerance and move with more confidence.
No equipment. No gym. Just a starting point.