Chronic Pain and Mental Health: Questions and Answers
individual's everyday life. Constant or recurring pain can prevent you from holding a job, playing your favorite sports, sleeping, or performing routine tasks. As a result, you can experience both physical and mental health issues.
The more you understand chronic pain's relationship with mental health — from its impacts on your mood and brain chemistry to modern techniques for helping people master their pain — the more effectively you can seek out your own solution to this debilitating problem. The following questions and answers in this blog can help.
How Does the Brain Handle Pain?
In addition to its many other functions, the brain acts as your body's communication hub. Your brain’s direct connection to the nervous system allows it to react to incoming signals, including those indicating a possible injury or illness. The brain then creates pain signals to warn you of the perceived danger.
While these pain messages typically vanish once an acute ailment or injury has healed, chronic health challenges offer no such relief. A long-term problem places the brain on high alert, compelling the brain to issue pain signals around the clock, with no end in sight.
How Does Chronic Pain Affect Emotions?
Chronic pain prompts the brain to go into fight-or-flight mode. It responds to perceived danger by boosting levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol. These stress hormones affect everything from heart rate and blood pressure to the way the brain actually works, producing psychological, emotional, and behavioral abnormalities.
Researchers have found strong links between chronic pain conditions and common mood disorders. For example, women who suffer from fibromyalgia have five times the normal risk for anxiety disorders. Chronic pain also appears to raise people's risks for clinical depression, PTSD, and bipolar disorder.
How Does Chronic Pain Promote Unhealthy Behaviors?
Many people who struggle with chronic pain try to gain relief from either prescription drugs, illicit substances, and/or easily purchased alternatives, such as alcohol. Unfortunately, many of these drugs — notably alcohol and opioids — can lead to addiction.
The psychological effects of chronic pain can change your behavior for the worse even without the influence of mind-altering substances. Chronic pain can distract you from various parts of your life that merit attention, such as your work, family, and friendships. The pain may even cause you to withdraw into unhealthy isolation.
How Can Psychotherapy Help With Chronic Pain?
Since pain originates in the brain, your own mind is a drug-free tool you can use to pursue safe, effective pain management. The brain's stress responses to pain can amplify the perception of that pain by forcing you to focus on the pain at the expense of everything else. You can learn to control those responses.
A well-known psychotherapy technique called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, can help you gain a stronger understanding of how your pain responses affect your mind and emotions. CBT aims to help you recognize those responses and reframe them in a different context to reduce their perceived intensity and importance.
CT typically represents one element of a holistic, comprehensive approach to chronic pain management, not a sole solution. If you undergo CBT for your chronic pain, your therapist may encourage you to continue with other forms of pain management, from therapeutic massage and exercise to the careful use of prescribed medications.
If you feel as if your chronic pain threatens your mental and emotional wellness, consult our experts at Heritage Mental Health Clinic. We will discuss your pain with you, evaluate your medical treatment history, and create a personalized treatment plan to help you gain more control over your symptoms. Contact our office today.