The psychological meaning that you assign to a physical pain signal will determine whether you simply feel pain (“Ouch, this hurts!”) or experience suffering (“Because I hurt, something awful or terrible is happening!”). Although pain and suffering are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction that needs to be made. Pain is an unpleasant signal telling you that something is wrong with your body. Suffering results from the meaning or interpretation your brain assigns to the pain signal.

Many people irrationally believe that: “I shouldn’t have pain!” or “Because I have pain and I’m having trouble managing my pain, there must be something wrong with me.” A big step toward effective pain management occurs when you can reduce your level of suffering by identifying and changing your irrational thinking and beliefs about the pain, which in turn decreases your stress and overall suffering.

Because of the two parts—pain and suffering—pain management must also have two components: physical and psychological.  The way people sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well they are able to manage it. 

Anticipation of an expected pain level (i.e., anticipatory pain) can influence the degree to which pain is experienced.  In some cases, when the anticipatory level of pain expectation is lowered, the brain responds by influencing special neurons.  This renders the brain less responsive to an incoming pain signal. Herein lays the rationale for including biofeedback, positive self-talk, meditation, and relaxation response training as part of your pain management treatment plan.

If you want to learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com. to learn more about how to develop effective chronic pain management please go to our Publications page and check out my book The Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide. To look for my upcoming trainings please go to our Calendar page. If you want to read more about pain and suffering you can find my article Pain Versus Suffering that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

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