Mindfulness To Pain

Applying mindfulness to pain

Mounting evidence from clinical studies shows that using mindfulness techniques can help reduce the pain of several chronic conditions, including arthritis, fibromyalgia, and spinal stenosis. Because pain involves the nervous system, it is a product of both your brain and your body. Your emotions and attitudes about pain—which are likely to be negative—affect how you experience it. So it it's natural to do anything to avoid it.

When you employ mindfulness, you take the opposite approach—getting close to the pain and getting to know it. It involves greeting pain as you would any other sensation—by experiencing it and observing it objectively. Where does it start? How does it change over a few minutes? How would you describe the sensation?

You may find that viewing pain objectively robs it of the power to generate dread and depression, which intensify the pain. You may gradually come to feel differently about your pain and be better able to live with it.