Mindfulness and Pain Management

In our last two blogs we talked about neuroplasticity and how the brain manages fear of pain.  In this post, we are going to look at mindfulness and its role in pain management.

Practicing mindfulness can actually change the way we perceive pain. You might think initially, no way, too woo woo for me, but if we learn how to practice not allowing our (completely normal) catastrophic thoughts about pain to take over, we will be able to manage pain better. To bring it back to neuroplasticity, mindfulness can actually change the activity in our brain.

So how do we do that? Meditation of course!  The key to reducing pain with meditation is to notice when pain is happening and experience it without judgment.  Doing this helps limit our subjective experience of pain and how we catastrophize it. Catastrophic thoughts like '“I won’t be able to sleep the pain is so bad” or “I can’t handle this”, can actually reinforce pain. By changing our subjective perspective or thought patterns, our experience of pain changes and the pain sensation is reduced.  Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center found that meditation can be effective in reducing the experience of pain. Read about the study here

This isn’t to say that we should only meditate when we have pain and that’s it.  Manual therapy can be very important and pharmacological interventions can be helpful in certain circumstances.  But practicing this kind of mindfulness can help us reduce our reliance on pharmacological interventions and the potential negative side effects that come with them.