Wellness Blog

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 can’t keep up. You may feel that some of your friends just don’t understand what you are experiencing and that some are even downright insensitive. Chronic pain can be lonely. But, … Read more

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 sleep quality did not directly affect disability, but rather that poor sleep quality tended to make people feel more depressed and tended to make their pain feel worse. These changes, … Read more

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 manage your pain or your life. It is true that pain often changes people. You may have lost some of the positive abilities that defined you. These losses are powerful and … Read more

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 – they live with your pain too. Not directly of course. They do not feel the hurt that you feel – they can never actually feel what you feel. But, they … Read more

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 encouraging us to slow down and recover a bit and get rid of anything “toxic” in the muscles before we start again. The image of rinsing away any past difficulties or toxic … Read more

Paul Karoly, Aaron Taylor, and I conducted a study of over 2,000 people with different forms of chronic pain from across the United States and found that 63%reported that pain interfered with sexual functioning. Other researchers have found similar results; some studies show that people with pain may simply give up sex altogether. I have listed some of the barriers to … Read more

Sleep plays a crucial role in the daily experience of people with chronic pain.  Of course, research (and probably your own experience) has demonstrated that pain can make it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. In a study involving people with fibromyalgia, Dr. Nancy Hamilton and her colleagues reported a complex set of  findings in which poor sleep had a … Read more

It is not uncommon for chronic pain to be linked to depression. For example,  35% of the participants in one study who reported chronic pain were also depressed. Risk of depression was not associated with any particular pain type or site. Pain and depression seem to have a “reciprocal relationship”: they tend to feed upon each other; more pain can … Read more

One of my first research studies involved examining the significance of the three most important people in one’s life to psychological well being and distress. I asked study participants to identify the most, 2nd most, and 3rd most important people in their lives and I asked a series of questions about the involvement of the three most … Read more