Adding mediation and mindfulness into your routine can have impact on your wellbeing. Daily pain is rare in children and adolescents. But as we reach adulthood, we grow more susceptible to bodily aches and pains. And in some cases, the pain does not subside for weeks or more.
More than one in five American adults has chronic pain. This occurs when we endure a prolonged, unpleasant experience that involves emotional suffering.
Pain often occurs along with other mental health challenges, especially when an individual has depression. In fact, chronic pain may lead to the development of depression and more than 60% of those with depression suffer from chronic pain.
Fear is one of the most common psychological factors that worsens our experience of pain. Even when pain is mild, fear can make us hesitant to move our bodies or to complete our usual routines. This hesitancy can cause us to avoid exercise, which may add to the pain of that area of the body. New options for pain relief are critically important because many rely on pain medications that have harmful side effects, especially after long-term use.
Many of the over-the-counter medications have the potential for harmful side effects. For instance, high use of aspirin and ibuprofen may damage the kidneys or digestive tract.
Chronic pain patients are sometimes prescribed opioids such as Vicodin, Oxycontin or Percocet. Although opioids are effect for short-term pain, they do not work well long-term. Plus, opioids have high addictive potential. Almost one in four individuals treated with opioids for chronic back pain results in addiction-like behaviors.
Luckily there is advancing research about what we can do to break out of chronic pain, although new methods take more time and effort than simply taking a pill. For those who are ready to transform their mindset for dealing with pain, the impressive results are worth it!
We now understand that pain is not the same experience for everyone. Pain has a personal component based on each individual’s associations and interpretation of that signal in the brain.
Pain isn’t something that happens to the brain; instead, pain is an experience we create in the brain. And that’s why your history of pain and how you view the context of your pain is a big deal.
Consider this scenario: After a gym workout, muscle soreness develops.
Some gym-goers expect soreness and view it as the marker of a challenging workout completed. Yet another gym-goer may have the same level of soreness, but fear for the return of a painful condition from their past. They may wonder if they are developing an inflammatory joint problem, such as tendonitis or arthritis. And these fears can make them hesitant to move the affected area. Without regular daily activity, a fearful individual might reduce blood flow to healing muscles, prolonging their healing time. While the seasoned gym-goer (who associates soreness with progress) may opt for a walk or light workout, enhancing blood flow throughout the body and shortening their healing time.
The same experience of pain can yield very different experiences!
When we experience pain, mentally or physically, we often try to reduce our suffering. For instance, we may try to distract ourselves, or self-soothe by telling ourselves that it’s going to be okay. Yet new studies point to mindset training as a way to cope, through mindfulness meditation. This guides us to the present moment, and can change the experience of pain.
With repeated practice, mindfulness can reduce the distress we experience, even when we are in pain.
Early studies from the University of Wisconsin reveal that expert meditators are able to feel the same level of discomfort as those who are new to meditation. So what is the big difference? Experienced meditators do not perceive the same degree of unpleasantness. “The pain didn’t bother the experts as much as it bothered the novices, in whom the anxiety of anticipation was stronger,” explains one of the research authors. This suggests our daily experience can be elevated just by learning to tune in to our moment-by-moment experience.
A new study is building on the idea that meditation can be used as a therapeutic skill. Brain scans reveal measurable changes during a brief, painful stimulus, after briefly training in mindfulness-based stress reduction. Pain responses were reduced among those who had the chance to build mindfulness meditation skills.
This is not selective numbness or ignoring pain signals. Instead, the same intensity of pain was detected in novice meditators as non-meditators, but the suffering was lower in the meditator group. And among long-term meditators, where intensive retreat participation was associated with a lower unpleasantness response to pain.
Mindfulness can help us feel more secure and support wellbeing, in part, through adjusting our experience of pain. This is why Treo hosts the top meditations from HealthyMinds directly on our platform. Our members can even set up a specific habit for meditation using our customized Habit Tiles.
We make mindfulness practices easy to find and use on the Treo Whole-person Platform. This is in line with our goal to help members make progress on the path to wellbeing. In fact, many researchers involved in the initial mindfulness research at the University of Wisconsin are the same experts who helped to create HealthyMinds!
Curious about how mindfulness and other resilience tools can help your club members or employees to improve their wellbeing? Let’s get in touch – info@treowellness.com.
As Treo’s Global Wellness Researcher, Karlie uses recent research findings to support healthier daily habits. Karlie earned her doctorate in Neuroscience and Behavior and bachelors in Health and Exercise Science.
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