If I go on a walk, my pain will get worse.

I can’t even go to the store without causing more pain.

My pain will never get better.

I didn’t finish my to-do list, therefore I am worthless.

Has your inner voice ever shifted in this direction during a pain flare-up? Maybe this is what your self-talk looks like on a typical day? Either way, these are examples of negative thoughts that are common for women living with chronic pain.

These types of thoughts are common because chronic pain significantly impacts your ability to engage in meaningful activities, social outings, important relationships, work, and your quality of life in general. Living with pain for many years is HARD. One huge component of how difficult it is, is that:

Pain is a constant reminder of all of the things that we could once do, but that would be more difficult to do now.

It’s really important to bring up the term “catastrophic thinking”. This term is REALLY important when we’re talking about the experience of pain. It refers to an exaggerated negative interpretation to an expected or actual experience of pain.

There are essentially three main ways that people think catastrophically about their pain:

1. They magnify the potential negative aspects of pain (magnification).

2. They have helpless thoughts about their ability to cope with pain (helplessness).

3. They have a hard time disengaging from thoughts about pain while they are anticipating pain, during a pain episode, or after experiencing pain (rumination).

Here is why pain catastrophizing is SO important when we are talking about pain experience. It correlates with higher pain intensity, disability, a lower threshold for pain, a poorer prognosis, a sensitized nervous system, and poor responses to pain interventions. In fact, this study showed that pain catastrophizing accounted for 31% of the variance in severity of pain.

It's normal to have a negative voice when you're in pain that may get pretty loud. You can get trapped into internalizing those thoughts, but usually they are either exaggerated or not true, and can impact you significantly.

If you can think back to at least the last time your pain flared up and could identify some negative thinking, it is likely that this happens more often than you think. Sometimes these thoughts happen automatically, even outside of our awareness. So we have to take real attention to respond to them and change them.

The general steps for responding to these negative thoughts are as follows:

1. Catch it: Try to pay attention and catch your thoughts right away when they happen. This will slow them down so that they become less automatic. Notice what triggers these thoughts so you can be prepared next time to squash them on the spot!

2. Check it: Become an investigator of your thoughts. Don't automically accept them to be true and, instead, become curious. How true is this thought really? Is it a bit distorted or exaggerated? Is there any evidence to support it? Is there evidence that challenges this thought.

3. Change it: Consider what evidence exists that challenges your negative thoughts and use it to come up with a new, less negative, or more neutral thought to replace it with.

Pain is always trying to take back the driver's seat and be in control. Taking over your thoughts is one way this happens, but today's email is a reminder that you can take back the power by learning to recognize and challenge these automatic negative thoughts.

When you can transform your thoughts, you take control of your pain dial, harness the calm and centered part of you, and transform your pain experience.

Education provides the power to take the next step in managing your pain. You want to do the things you enjoy (or even basic daily activities) without flaring up your pain. For a limited time, you can grab my free video tutorial to get you started:

3 Simple Steps to a Balanced Day... Without the Flare-Ups.

This free video tutorial is dedicated to helping women with pain begin to find confidence to return to the moments, activities, and people they love the most.

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