Using Mindful Techniques to Help with Pain Management

What is Mindfulness?

The definition is “a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment while calming acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique”. Mindfulness includes techniques used to address the mental and emotional aspects of being in pain but also impact the autonomic nervous system in a helpful way by creating calm, slowing down your fight or flight response to stress and worry, and helping change your mental focus. Research has shown that people who add mindful techniques to their daily regimen, have decreased emotional reactivity, stress, anxiety, and depression, and regular use of these techniques can strengthen the nerve connections involved in managing these issues, which also will activate the associated regions on the brain responsible for those feelings and emotions.

A specific study completed at the University of Washington Healthcare System in 2020 by E. Boynton concluded that Meditation can deactivate the sympathetic nervous system- the ‘fight or flight response’ and turn on the parasympathetic system which helps to reduce pain, depression, stress, and anxiety. Another benefit of meditation or other mindful techniques is that the more you do it, the better you become at stopping your reaction to whatever is triggering you. Sensory and emotional ‘triggers’ (a stimulus that causes you to react) will intensify the sensations that you are already facing, such as pain.

Most people seeking Physical Therapy treatment do so because they have pain that disrupts daily living. There are two types of pain that the human body experiences and each type responds to treatment differently. Typical pain associated with injuries to muscle, joint structures, and bone are referred to as “musculoskeletal pain” and this is the most common form of pain that we treat in PT because there is inflammation present near most injury sites. The other type of pain is caused by disruption to the flow of nerve impulses in the nervous system- because the nerve itself is damaged or because the brain/spinal cord are not communicating to the nerves correctly because of disease. This is called “neuropathic pain” and may occur in people who have diseases or injuries to the brain, spinal cord, or nerves of the body. Managing pain can include a lot of different treatment methods provided by your Physical Therapist or Physician, and include medications, heating and cooling, manual therapies, electrical treatments, and dry needling to name a few. These types of treatment are beneficial and make a difference in pain for many people; however, for some people, being in pain can change or intensify with day-to-day stress, worries, and anxiety. These can impact your pain so that it disrupts sleep, triggers emotions, and creates frustration. This can also create a cycle of pain that can become chronic and lead to other medical issues. Additionally, neuropathic type pain does not usually respond as well to these treatments as musculoskeletal pain does.

Adding simple mindful techniques to your daily activities, even for 5 minutes a day, can make a big difference in your pain response, especially with repeated use. Some examples of Mindful techniques are:

• Breathwork: deep inhalation combined with an exhaled ‘sigh’, a slight hold to the breath before exhalation, or by exhaling much slower than your inhale, can create both physical and mental relaxation and calming
• Sound Baths: listening to singing bowls, nature sounds, and quiet music/spa music, will change the brain wave impulses and create physical relaxation, changes to your blood pressure, and reduce your focus on anxiety-causing thoughts. Another special form of music called “Binaural Beats” is crafted to produce a music that targets specific brain waves that we experience during our days and nights, i.e. Delta Waves for sleep and Theta Waves for dreaming. This music helps the brain to create these waves so that you can get a better night’s rest or increase your dream cycle, both of which impact stress and pain levels
• Meditation: there are many types of meditation practices, but the easiest for a beginner is a ‘guided meditation’ where a guide talks you through a series of images, progressive relaxation, or thoughts that enables the listener to create a calmer brain that improves pain levels, worry, or stress levels that also impact pain.

There are many resources for these techniques available on apps, social media, websites, and through trained practitioners who can teach you or who offer regular classes for you to practice. These techniques offer a boost to your other pain management interventions and will give you added long term benefits such as stress reduction, calming anxiety or worries, better sleep, and by activating your body’s natural pain management chemicals (endorphins) in the parasympathetic nervous system.