Adopting an Attitude that You're Healthy despite having Chronic Pain: Coping with Pain Series
Chronic pain rehabilitation programs are a traditional and effective treatment for chronic pain. Such programs are based on cognitive-behavioral principles that aim to change how you experience pain. By doing so, chronic pain rehabilitation programs help you to a) reduce pain and b) return to meaningful life activities even though some level of pain may persist. In other words, by participating in chronic pain rehabilitation, you change your relationship to chronic pain. You no longer perceive pain as an alarming and disabling condition, but develop the know-how to understand your pain as a benign condition that no longer needs to disrupt or prevent your daily life activities.
Wouldn’t it be good to become so competent at dealing with persistent pain that you no longer are disabled by it?
Reducing Pain Talk: Coping with Pain Series
A common complaint among people with chronic pain is that their pain has come to occupy too much of everyone’s time, attention or energy. In other words, it can sometimes feel like their pain is the only thing anyone ever talks to them about – that they’ve become almost synonymous with their pain.
We call it pain talk. Pain talk is the persistent verbal focus of everyone’s attention on the pain of someone with persistent pain.
Reducing Pain Behaviors: Coping with Pain Series
One of the more long-standing recommendations of chronic pain rehabilitation is to reduce pain behaviors. It’s one of the ways that people with persistent pain can learn to cope better with pain. Let’s review how to do it.
Activity versus Exercise: Coping with Pain Series
Exercise, of course, is good for you. Activity is good for you too. Both are helpful for those with chronic pain. Yet, they are different. They are not an equal substitute for the other. Let’s explain.
On Hearing Patient Stories & Building Community
The Institute for Chronic Pain is an educational and public policy think tank that produces academic quality information on chronic pain. We aim to provide such information in a manner that’s empirically accurate, yet also approachable to patients, their families, non-specialist healthcare providers, third party payers, and public policy analysts. We do so because the field of chronic pain management needs to change.
Treatment Plan: Do Nothing?
It's cold and flu season again and we all do the best we can to stay well and avoid catching an all-too-contagious virus. We each have our own go-to plans of how to fight it: vitamin C, zinc or elderberry supplements, gargling with salt water, staying warm, rest and binge-watching Netflix shows. My grandmother swore by anise candy that she made from scratch, while my father prefers a hot toddy to remedy a cold. Washing hands is still the number one way to avoid illness -- along with avoiding contact with your face, and keeping your immune system strong.
What Would You Do If You Had Less Pain? (Part 2)
6. Spend More Time with Loved Ones; 7. Travel; 8. Live More Independently; 9. Enjoy Life More; 10. Be in a Better Mood
What Would You Do If You Had Less Pain?
1. Everything; 2. More of What I Am Already Doing; 3. Clean My House; 4. Get Back to Work; 5. Exercise
How to Get Better When Pain is Chronic
In the last post, we began to introduce a broad definition of coping, as one’s subjective experience, or reaction, to a problem. In this post, let’s expand on this definition and explain how coming to cope better with a problem is a process of coming to experience the problem in a different and better way.
Can you experience your pain differently?
A major tenet of chronic pain rehabilitation is that the way you experience pain is not the only possible way to experience pain. In other words, the experience of pain differs across individuals and can even differ in the same individual across time. As such, it's possible to have a different experience of pain than the experience that you have today, even if your pain remains on a chronic course.
Developing an Observational Self: How to Cope with Pain Series
From the time before Socrates in ancient Greece there stood a temple built upon a spring at a location the Greeks would have considered the center of the world. They called the temple, "Delphi". Inscribed on the walls of this holy temple was the simple phrase, “Know Thyself”.
Coping: Ideas that Change Pain
Coping-based healthcare is often misunderstood in society and, as a result, it is commonly neglected by healthcare providers and patients alike. Examples of such care are chronic pain rehabilitation for pain disorders, cardiac rehabilitation for heart disease, psychotherapy for mental health disorders, or diabetic education for diabetes. These therapies are often the last thing that healthcare providers recommend or the last thing people are willing to try, even though they are typically some of the most effective treatments for their respective conditions.
Overcoming Perfectionism
In the last post, we discussed the nature of perfectionism and the problems associated with it. Specifically, we reviewed how perfectionism is problematic and how perfectionism leads to poor coping with chronic pain. In this post, let’s review some basic ways to begin to overcome perfectionism.
The Perfectionist and Chronic Pain: How to Cope with Pain Series
While clinical lore is that perfectionists are more prone to the development of chronic pain, it may just be that perfectionists are more likely to seek care for their chronic pain. Reason? Perfectionists with chronic pain are more prone to behavioral exacerbations of pain as well as anxiety and depression. Let’s see how.
Mind Reading: How to Cope with Pain Series
No, this post isn't about telepathy. It’s about a common problem faced by people with chronic pain and how to overcome it.
Mind reading defined
The phrase “mind reading” is a piece of technical jargon used in cognitive behavioral therapy and chronic pain rehabilitation programs. It refers to a particular type of thinking in which a person thinks that other people are judging him or her even though the other people might not ever say anything.
How People Cope with Pain Really Well: 2
In the last post, we started a discussion about how people cope with chronic pain really well. Specifically, we looked at five attributes and skills that people do when coping well with chronic pain. The point of the discussion was that it is a way to learn how to cope better. Coping with chronic pain is a set of skills like any other set of skills and you learn how to cope with pain just like you learn other skills – like learning how to knit or play the piano or play tennis.
Coping with Pain: How People Who Cope Really Well Do It
If you wanted to learn how to knit well, you might take a class at your community craft store. You might also get a how-to book out of the library or watch a few YouTube videos. But as you did all these things, you would also pay attention to those who already knit well and watch how they do it. You would then try to do what they do.