Pain Journaling to Improve Your Chronic Pain Management
Effectively Using a Pain Journal
Below you will have an opportunity to gain more insights about your personal pain relationship. The main purpose is for you to gather daily written feedback regarding your internal perception (insights) of your pain condition and how you manage your pain. You will be looking for triggers (both physical and psychological/emotional or stress related) and patterns for your pain. This is your starting point for have an improved relationship with your pain.
Pain journaling is a common tool in chronic pain management and many of you have probably already been exposed to this concept. In the exercise below I’m showing you one of the pain journaling assignments I used effectively with many of my chronic pain patients. Remember, this is just one way of pain journaling—not the only way.
Please Follow the Six Steps Below
- In your journal at least two times per day list the type of pain—also note whether it is more physiological or psychological/emotional—and the highest level of pain (using the 0 to 10 pain scale) that you are experiencing and why you rated it that way.
- Note what you do for your pain (i.e., medication, stretching, exercise, massage, etc) and how well it works (on 0 to 10 scale with 0 meaning not at all and 10 meaning totally).
- Identify what you were doing (that day or earlier) that may have triggered the pain and make note any ways you could avoid those situations (triggers) in the future. Be sure to include both physical triggers and stress or emotional triggers.
- Identify any negative (self-defeating or addictive) thoughts you are having because of your pain.
- Identify any uncomfortable feelings you are having because of your pain.
- At the end of each day identify the most important thing you learned about your pain and commit to one thing that you will do differently to improve your pain management.
To learn about the imporance of using a multi-faceted approach to chronic pain management please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.
If you’d like to receive training for helping people with chronic pain and coexisting disorders, including addiction, I’m very excited to announce we are presenting my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Certification Training in Sacramento on August 5-7, 2010. To learn more about this 3 day 20 hour training and my other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.
You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.
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