How pain is created in the mind, and how mindfulness can help.

When something happens that causes pain, such as a twinge in your knee, the body sends a message via the central nervous system to the brain, where the thalamus receives this information, relays it around the brain to get inputs, then reactively sends out a pain message. A lot of factors are considered, including previous experience of such an event. The severity of pain experienced can be impacted by mood, stress, and anxiety - and just generally the way we feel. 

 

Therefore, although you might feel that the pain is not in your mind – it kind of is! Although pain is real, the response to it is created in the head. Pain is a vital alert system to tell us that something is not right in the body, and we need to take action. This is extremely useful of course if we have a broken leg. The pain message is a warning to take the weight off it. This kind of pain is acute. But when we have chronic pain - that is, the type of pain which lingers even after tissues have healed - is where the mindfulness approach can really turn the volume down on the suffering. It is this type of pain where the mind and body play tricks on each other, and we can get stuck in habitual pain signals which should have long gone. 

 

In the case of back pain for example, where there may be no physical diagnosis or root cause, the level of stress and anxiety we have causes a mental issue and a physical one. We go into protection mode - stop moving the body part becasue we are afraid of damage, the resulting stress cand worry causes muscles to tighten, worsening the problem. 

 

This is interesting to note, since your level of pain can therefore be dictated by your general stress levels, and further pain is caused by them too! Hence, yes you guessed it, learning to calm your mind through mindfulness is a fabulous tool to manage your pain.