What have I learned from working with people in pain?
Many people in the world live with chronic pain. Pain that does not always have an easy explanation. Pain that can come and go unpredictably. Pain is complicated and the skills to self-manage it and live well in spite of pain will not look the same way to each person. But I have learned that when you have some knowledge about how your mind and body work in connection with pain, and have some practical skills you can apply in your daily life, you can exert more control over your situation than you realise.
I recorded this video for World Mental Health day in 2023.
In it I cover the following topics:
- What is chronic pain? And what are some of the causes?
- How pain is protective and how the sensitivity of the alarm system can go wrong.
- The different roles of biology, psychology and social factors and how they can combine to make pain better or worse.
- Where mindfulness fits in to self-management of pain.
- The inter-play of physical sensation and emotional suffering.
- How you can learn to dial down the emotional components – the anger, anxiety, stress – and in doing so reduce the intensity and duration of the physical symptoms.
At the end there’s a practical exercise to introduce how to bring your mind into your body.
The whole video is less than 10 minutes long.
Consider it my New Year gift to you.
How to use mindfulness for pain
If this has caught your attention and you’d like to know more, please do explore the website. And follow me on social media, or message me with any question here.
