Headaches, migraine, back, neck or joint pain, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia – they’re just some of the common causes of chronic pain, which affects at least 1 in 5 Australians aged over 45 each year (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2020).
According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), pain is defined as ‘an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage’. This is a complex definition; however, it describes pain as both a physiologic process and a mental process.
Meditation is increasingly being used to support the reduction of chronic pain, and I recently attended Celia Robert’s excellent workshop on this topic.
Amid the wealth of research on pain management is the idea that a large proportion of pain is anticipatory – i.e if we are expecting something to be painful, it’s more likely it will be. Pain therefore, can be closely linked to emotional regulation; when our nervous system is fired up (a danger or fear response) we will switch on our pain system.
Pain that surpasses an expected healing period, such as the time you’d expect to heal an acute injury, suggests that when the brain perceives a threat to the body’s well-being, a protective pain response is activated.
Mindfulness meditation can play a role in affecting anticipation and potentially reducing pain. Focusing on painful areas of the body, such as through focused concentration and body scanning may help individuals who are fearful of the pain realise it’s not as bad as they thought, and alleviate their experience of it. That said, these techniques seem to be more effective in the ‘health anxious’ population who are hyper-aware and generally more worried about their health.
In contrast, those with ‘low health anxiety’, tend to deal with the pain more effectively through distraction; in meditation this could look like gentle movement, mantra, and breathwork that stimulate an overall relaxation response, moving the focus away from an area of pain.
How we experience chronic pain comes from the totality of our environment – the physical body as well as our emotional and social contexts. Becoming more aware of what drives our own protective/stress responses is the pathway to better understanding and thus managing our pain in the long term.
The sustained focus and concentration built through regular meditation and yoga practice helps build overall stress and pain resilience.
Seasoned meditators and yoga practitioners tend to show a higher pain threshold than average, which correlates with a higher volume of insular cortex (grey matter) in the brain that is built through practice over time. This is the area of the brain that’s important for emotional regulation, homeostasis regulation, and interoception (the ability to sense the status of the body’s internal condition). So it makes sense that building this part of the brain would affect pain resilience.
In any case, pain is the bodies way of telling us that something is out of sync – if we listen in carefully and deeply, we may find a way to relieve and heal ourselves.
Further reading:
This recent Guardian article also describes how chronic pain suffers are taking up mindfulness to help manage their symptoms.
Some other good places to explore this topic are:
Ellen Langer – ‘Mother of mindfulness’ on healing timeframes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fEg5dynb3Y
How To Heal Chronic Pain with Dr Howard Schubiner
RAYNEE DEWAR 