Living with Chronic Pain: Discovering Gratitude
It can be difficult to feel thankful when you live with chronic pain. Because pain may interfere with important areas of life, you may have…
Living with Pain: Goals Matter
Chronic pain can make your goals seem unimportant or unreachable. Your pain may interfere with your social goals, career goals, or family goals. Personal goals…
Five Ways to Improve Your Self-Efficacy
Chronic pain often gets in the way of life. Pain can cancel, interrupt, delay, interfere with, and diminish living. The worst part is that it…
Living with Pain: Create a Soothing Space
Stress can make chronic pain worse. Whether you suffer from headaches, arthritis, abdominal pain, temporomandibular disorder, or any other chronic pain condition you may benefit from identifying methods to…
Friends & Pain: 9 Ways to Improve Relationships
Maybe you see friends less often than you used to. Or maybe you have lost touch with friends you feel are too active, believing you…
Sleep Quality, Depression, Pain and Disability
Felix Naughton and his colleagues conducted a study to examine the relationship between sleep quality, depression, pain severity, and disability. Their results (reported in the journal Pain) showed that…
Don’t Let Pain Define You
Living with severe pain can be a trigger for depression, a sense of loss of who you are and who you will become, and a belief that you can’t…
Living With Pain: The Challenge of Habituation
I have written a number of blog posts about the relationship issues associated with chronic pain. Today, I want to focus on your relationships with family –…
Chronic Pain Can be Lonely: Nine Ways to Reconnect
Chronic pain can make it hard to feel connected to others. Pain puts a strain on friendship – whether you have fibromyalgia, headaches, back pain,…
Pain and Anxiety: Rinse It Out
In spin class, I have frequently heard instructors say “rinse it out” after a particularly intense bout of cycling. I have always supposed that they are…