If you’ve ever struggled with chronic pain, you know how it can affect nearly every area of your life. With pain costing the United States a record $560 to $635 billion annually, chronic pain management is one of the most critical areas of concern in the medical community. Not to mention, every day you suffer from chronic pain leads to further loss of productivity and lowers your quality of life. However, with mindfulness, you can manage your chronic pain effectively.
We’ll explore why mindfulness is excellent for chronic pain management and how solutions like meditation and even Tai Chi can help you alleviate some of your discomfort. We’ll even discuss some of the best tips for practically incorporating mindfulness into your daily life. If you’re ready to see how this can help with your chronic pain, then let’s dive in!
The Connection Between Chronic Pain and Mindfulness
The connection between chronic pain and mindfulness is one of the most heavily discussed in the medical world today, especially for those looking for a holistic route to help their patients. Mindfulness and chronic pain are connected because mindfulness has become a sought-after, noninvasive solution for many dealing with chronic pain.
If you don’t know precisely what chronic pain is, it is typically defined as any pain that lasts more than 12 weeks or more, and it is one of the most common reasons people end up with disabilities (Source: PubMed). Whether you have arthritis, nerve damage, fibromyalgia, or back pain, it can impact your physical health, daily functioning, and even your mental health. Fortunately, mindfulness can help you mitigate chronic pain.
With mindfulness, you can refocus your mind away from the pain you’re facing and instead focus on being present and aware of what you see in the world around you. Many who practice mindfulness see how it can impact people’s experiences with chronic pain, as well as their moods, anxiety, depression, and even drug use to mitigate chronic pain.
Mindfulness has truthfully become one of the most amazing, noninvasive solutions for dealing with chronic pain, so let’s take a closer look at this connection, including how mindfulness helps you manage it.
How Mindfulness Helps You Manage Chronic Pain
So, we know that mindfulness is a solution for chronic pain, but how specifically can it help us? We’ll look at how mindfulness can aid with persistent aches, including how you perceive pain after mindfulness sessions, how it can help reduce stress, and how it can improve your coping mechanisms.
Mindfulness Enhances the Mind-Body Connection
One of the main reasons that mindfulness helps with chronic pain is due to the mind-body connection. These approaches typically work on altering your mental or emotional state or using physical movement to produce mental relaxation. By using mindfulness practices like meditation, deep breathing, or mindfulness-based stress reduction, you can build awareness and acceptance, even for issues like chronic pain (Source: Harvard Health Publishing).
Mindfulness Therapies May Reduce Pain Perception or Severity
Believe it or not, mindfulness therapies can actually help you with reducing pain perception. According to experts, mindfulness meditation can work as a form of pain relief to help you become more in control of your cognitive and emotional responses, including your evaluation of your pain. In other words, as you become more connected to your body, your pain becomes more manageable.
Meditation or Yoga Can Reduce Your Stress Levels
By using strategies like yoga, meditation, and more, you can actually encourage stress reduction in your life. Of course, the stressors you face will not go away, but your resilience against them will increase.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction specifically can help you reduce stress and treat chronic pain by helping you become more adept at handling the challenges of chronic pain management (Source: PubMed). Additionally, the less stressed your body is, the less inflamed you may be, which can reduce your pain.
Mindfulness May Help with Emotional Regulation
One of the main benefits of mindfulness is not only how it helps you with chronic pain reduction but also how it can enhance your emotional regulation. When you’re meditating, you’re able to recognize your emotions without judgment while also taking into account your thoughts and feelings as they arise.
Experts recently found that mindfulness affects the brain areas responsible for self-awareness and emotional regulation, thereby helping you separate the pain from the self (Source: Biological Psychiatry). So, if you meditate regularly, you can enhance your emotional regulation and view your pain differently.
These Therapies Can Improve Your Coping Mechanisms
All in all, mindfulness therapies can improve your coping mechanisms and the way that you respond to chronic pain. When you face chronic pain—day in and day out—without any sort of relief or way to process it, you struggle to cope. However, even just spending a few minutes a day doing some mindfulness training can help you improve how you cope with pain. It may not reduce your chronic pain, but a short meditation can help you manage your symptoms more effectively.
Tips for Incorporating Mindfulness into Your Daily Routine
You don’t have to become an expert or certified in mindfulness meditation to incorporate these strategies into your life. They can be done in simple, short little sessions. Try out a few guided meditation tracks and start small with only five to ten minutes per day.
Some of the easiest techniques to start with are mindful breathing sessions, guided meditation, or even body scan meditations, where you examine how you feel and what areas may be in more pain that day. All of these are great ways to get started to become more aware of your chronic pain so you can manage it better to enhance your quality of life.
How Will You Add Mindfulness Sessions to Your Day?
Mindfulness can help you a ton if you struggle with chronic pain management. Because of the plethora of benefits associated with practices like deep breathing and meditation sessions, there’s no reason not to try it! We hope that you learned something new in this article. If you struggle with chronic pain, what steps are you going to take to add mindfulness to your daily schedule?
