Common mistakes about pain – and how to avoid them with mindfulness: part one
Alison Bale
Using science and practical skills to reduce persistent pain ?? Improve your mental health and get your life back ?? Mindfulness teacher for groups and individuals ??
More and more people live with persistent pain. Between 30 and 40 per cent of men and women, rising to 50 per cent if you are going through peri/menopause, or over 75 years of age.?There are common mistakes about pain, and how to manage it. In this blog I outline three of the most common, and how practicing mindfulness can help you avoid them.
Pain equals tissue damage
It is easy to think that if something hurts, you must have damaged a muscle, joint, or ligament. And if your pain is of recent onset, this may be true. There may be swelling and redness, blisters or bruising. A sense or strain or soreness, in a specific area, that will usually ease in a few days. However, many people develop ongoing pain – more than three months’ duration – without any obvious trauma or damage. Multiple studies of low back pain, or example, indicate that?tissue changes seen on MRI are not indicative of whether someone will have pain.
Pain is part of your body’s protection mechanism. If your brain thinks part of your body needs protecting, you will get body pain in the part in question. You cannot prevent this happening, but you can use the mindful attitude of acceptance to ease the distress.
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Acceptance?invites you to acknowledge the experience – ‘here is pain’ – without resisting, avoiding or tensing against it. Once you acknowledge what is already here, you can reduce the tension and contraction in your body that can make pain worse.
One way to practice Acceptance with pain is to get curious about the sensations. See if you can look at your pain with curiosity. You might try asking some unusual questions – what colour is your pain? Is it deep or shallow in your body? Still or moving. And if you change the colour, the depth, what happens then?
Other mistakes include thinking that the severity of pain equates with the seriousness of a problem. And that whatever your problem, there is one solution that will suit everyone. To read more about these myths, and how mindfulness can can help you avoid them, click here.
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2 年This is so well written, Alison. I never considered that pain was our body telling us that part of us needed protecting, I always thought pain meant something was broken. Thank you for instilling a sense of curiosity with regards to pain and what it actually means ??