7 Simple Strategies For Dealing With The Psychological Impact Of Chronic Pain

When you’re struggling with ongoing chronic pain, it’s not just about dealing with the pain itself and the limitations that come with it. It’s also the psychological impact of chronic pain which can begin to affect your mental and emotional state.

Being in constant pain and being inconvenienced moment to moment and from day to day can be really challenging, leading us to experience feelings such as anger, frustration, different manifestations of fear, depression and uncertainty.

In my experience, the one thing that gets overlooked when it comes to chronic pain and conditions is the emotional aspects of the issue. And this is too much of an important point to ignore and not work on.

The Pain-Emotion cycle

As we learn from TMS theory, your psychological state can be the actual cause of this pain continuing, and it can be the very reason it doesn’t let up.

The Mind-Body has learnt (conditioned) itself to be in pain. The pain and emotion (how you feel about the pain) have become linked, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. In other words, the pain and one’s emotional reaction to it both begin to feed each other as follows:

1. You feel the physical pain

2. You have an emotional reaction to the pain

3. That reaction then feeds the pain some more

4. Leading to more ongoing emotional reaction

And this cycle continues. The body has conditioned itself to keep this pain cycle going.

We need to be able to break this Pain – Emotion cycle to be able to reduce the level of pain, and even begin recovering from the chronic pain itself.

This is not always easy to do, but it’s an essential step towards healing. Even if that healing is only to give you some peace of mind in relation to the chronic pain itself.

Strategies for breaking the Pain-Emotion cycle

Below, I’m going to outline 7 strategies that will help you ...

• Get your mind off the pain.

• Possibly reduce the level of pain you’re experiencing in any given moment.

• Get to sleep when you are in pain.

• Begin to break the Pain-Emotion cycle.

• Ideally heal and recover from the chronic pain you are experiencing.

These are 7 of the strategies I’ve personally used myself to help me through a debilitating ear condition AND help me recover to the point where I am now.

1. Stop Identifying With The Pain

The thing to remember about pain is that it is not you. The purpose of pain is to let you know that some part of you needs your attention. It’s a feedback system.

When we say “My Pain” or “My Condition”, we are making it a part of us. We are identifying with it in that we are making it part of our identity.

Look at the cases of people with Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder). One personality can have a certain health condition like asthma, but when they shift to another personality, this new personality doesn’t have asthma at all. Same body, but different identity.

Think about that for a moment ...

There are personalities/identities within themselves that don’t identify with having asthma.

Can you step back and just see the pain as feedback and not you? It’s simply pain. Not “your” pain. To make it “yours” means you have taken ownership of it and if it is yours, you are valuing it.

Start calling it “the/this pain” rather than identifying with it as “my pain”.

And remember ... you EXPERIENCE pain. You FEEL pain. But you are NOT “the” pain. That means you can simply step back and observe it, without becoming identified with it and getting involved in it’s drama.

This leads me into the following strategy.

2. Learn To Accept & Surrender To The Pain

Acceptance and surrender is not weakness. Quite the opposite actually. To accept and surrender is to give up the resistance towards what you are experiencing in the present moment. To stop the fight. Because as the saying goes ... “What you resist, persists”.

It’s the very act of resistance (wanting to get rid of the

pain, or wanting it to stop) that is the very thing that makes the pain worse. It’s the struggle and trying to fight it off.

Why? Because to struggle against something means it will bring up emotional turmoil.

And as we have touched on above, how we feel emotionally contributes to the amount of pain we experience.

By accepting and surrendering to the pain, we reduce this emotional resistance and allow it to just be. By accepting and surrendering, it makes it easier to just observe it without getting drawn into it.

Again, we are not giving in to pain. We are just giving up getting involved in the “drama” of the pain and the emotional resistance we are having towards it. It’s the emotional resistance that contributes to the level of pain we experience.

3. Feel Into Other Areas Of The Body

Some quick questions for you ...

How often do you think about your pain?

How much of your attention does it get?

Because I don’t know who I’m speaking to here, to make this point, let’s just use back pain as an example.

Your back has received a lot of your time and attention from all this, right?

Do you think other parts of your body have been neglected?

How’s the big toe on your left foot going? How about your left ear lobe?

When I used to have trouble sleeping due to my ringing ears and the fears I’d have around it, I’d shift my focus to my toes. I specifically did my toes because they were as far away from my ears as possible.

What sensations was I noticing? Were my toes cold, hot, tingling, burning, etc. I’d just get really curious about their experience in that moment.

And you can do similar with any other body part that isn’t in pain in the moment.

This helps shift your attention away from that part of you that has been getting so much attention. It allows you some space to slow your mind down. And by doing this, it will help you fall asleep if that’s what you’re trying to achieve.

A variation of this is to scan the body and feel the energy within it. A mild tingly sensation.

Start at the bottom of the feet, and feel the energy tingling for about 5-10 seconds. Then move your attention and feel this energy in your ankles. Feel it there for about 5-10 seconds and move up to the calves and thighs. Then keep repeating this process, feeling the energy as you continue to shift your attention to higher parts of your body.

By doing these body scan type meditations, it helps pull your attention away from your pain. At the same time, it slows down your head noise and calms your emotional state as well.

And as we have mentioned, calming down your emotional state will help reduce the level of pain you are experiencing.

4. Focus On Your Goals & Values

When I was heavily stuck in the Pain-Emotion Cycle with my sensitivity to sound (Hyperacusis) and ringing ears (Tinnitus), my ENT specialist told me that the way to break this cycle was to focus on your goals and values.

So instead of focusing on the fearful “what if’s” and what this pain is costing you, shift your focus towards what you want to be able to do if you don’t have the pain.

This gives the brain a new goal. The brain is nothing but a goal achieving machine. It sets out to achieve goals. If you’re constantly thinking about the pain and the negatives about it, it will look to find ways to achieve those negative goals.

What I ended up doing was finding something that really excited me so as to help keep my mind focused on that. It ended up exciting me so much that I didn’t have trouble sleeping from the ear issue, but I started having trouble sleeping from the excitement of all the ideas I was having!

It might seem impossible to take action on now with your current situation (as it was for me back then), but I encourage you to dream big. Find something that excites you and you love to think about.

And don’t think of it in relation to how it seems unachievable to you now and allow it to depress you.

Remember, we are looking to shift emotional state here, and focus is huge in this regard. So focus on what you DO want (and what you CAN currently do) rather than your current limitations.

5. Create Your OWN Support Network

Support groups are a double edged sword.

When I was first struck down with my ear issue, I went into some Facebook groups for my condition to see other people’s experience with it and to get some hope.

It didn’t take me long to get scared and feel like I could never get any better or recover. So I soon stopped going in there as I felt these groups were impacting me negatively.

Support groups can be good to get resources and useful information, but they are not good for getting comforted by others in the same situation if you want to heal. It just constantly reminds you of your condition and re-enforcing it ... keeping you stuck where you are.

Thankfully, I found a great ENT specialist who gave me the confidence as to what was possible and I decided to

only listen to him and follow his advice. He had experience and previous successful patients/cases to back up what he was telling me.

As I did start to recover, I realised something about these support groups.

You only tend to hear negative stories in them. People who have recovered and healed don’t have any need to go back into these support groups. They are busy getting on with their lives, so they don’t tend to spend time posting in them.

As they say, misery loves company ... and there’s a reason for that. So be careful who you are hanging around and getting support from!

Find the right support network for yourself (including friends). People who will support you, but also challenge you to do what’s necessary to make progress towards healing.

6. Paradoxical Intention

There are many things in life where the answer to an issue is counter-intuitive. With Paradoxical Intention, what we are doing is going against the obvious, or what seems to make more sense.

In regards to pain, instead of trying to push the pain away and resist it, we welcome it. Not only welcome it, but we ask it for more. To “bring it on”!

It does sound a bit crazy to ask for more pain. But remember what we said about resistance above? Emotional resistance is what makes pain worse.

By asking for more pain, we go against that resistance. We are actually flowing with the pain instead of against it. We have turned the tables.

This goes hand in hand with acceptance and surrender we discussed above. We are now paddling the same direction with the stream rather than frantically paddling against it and leaving ourselves exhausted.

7. Focus On Gratitude

The concept of gratitude was huge for me and a big turning point for my many years of chronic anxiety.

The interesting thing to note about gratitude is that we can’t feel fear and gratitude at the same time. It’s neurologically impossible as they share the same neural network in the brain.

If you are frequently journaling about your pain, then guess what? You are focusing more and more on your pain. You are conditioning your brain to focus more on it.

Once I learnt this concept of gratitude, I’d just make a few reference notes about my anxiety, and I started doing gratitude journaling to train my brain to focus on gratitude instead.

Focus is HUGE! And to focus on gratitude is the pathway out of fear.

So if you’re neutralising fears by focusing on gratitude instead, you will also be de-energising the pain for reasons we discussed above.

Whether you decide to start gratitude journaling or not is up to you, but I suggest you start looking at things in your life through the lens of gratitude, and make doing so a habit.

More tips to calm Emotional States & Reduce Physical Pain or Symptoms

From experience with my own chronic health conditions, working with others, and also from my studies, I’ve come to realise one key factor. And that key factor is how much emotions affect the physical body.

Emotions seem to be that area that people want to avoid because they feel they can’t control what their emotions are doing at any given moment.

It was similar for me. Until I learnt a few “tricks and techniques” from a few different healing modalities that I’d now like to share with you.

They will help you get control over your emotions very quickly, and in turn, will help you reduce any pain/symptoms you may be experiencing.

I have put together 7 short FOLLOW ALONG videos where I demonstrating the ...

“7 Simple Stress Relief Techniques To Calm Emotional States & Reduce Physical Pain/Symptoms ... Within Seconds!”

If you’d like to give them a go and see what difference they make for you, simply Join My Facebook Group Here , answer the 3 short membership questions, and I’ll give you FREE access to the 7 Stress & Pain Relief techniques as a welcome gift.

Remember to keep focusing forward, and I wish you all the best for your healing journey ahead.

About Michael

Michael Sfirse is a certified EFT Tapping & NLP Practitioner, and a Transformational Life Coach with a special interest in the Mind-Body Connection and its relationship to chronic pain and health conditions. He is also a former chronic anxiety sufferer and has made significant progress working through healing some of his own physical conditions.

You can connect with Michael and get 7 Stress & Pain Relief Techniques when you join his Facebook Group: “From Stressed To Blessed”.