Use Your Mind for Chronic Pain Relief
These three techniques can help people suffering from persistent pain, research shows
Pain is our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. When it’s acute, it tends to start suddenly, with an obvious cause (like a broken bone) and a standard fix. But chronic pain, experienced by 1 in 5 adults in the U.S., persists for more than three months (or beyond an injury’s expected healing time). And it sometimes doesn’t have a clear cause. So if you have chronic pain, how can you find relief and improve your quality of life? “We’ve learned a lot in recent years about the major differences between acute and chronic pain, which require vastly different approaches,” says Kimeron Hardin, PhD, a clinical psychologist and president of the American Association of Pain Psychology.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
This is a form of short-term talk therapy that helps people identify negative thoughts and behaviors and develop skills to change them. For people with chronic pain, expecting the worst or focusing on the pain can actually increase the discomfort they feel. “Many people have fear-based or catastrophic thinking around pain that can make pain worse,” Hardin says. “CBT can help you understand patterns that might be exacerbating your pain and teach you how to recognize and replace those thoughts with something that’s soothing, comforting, and even more accurate.” A 2020 Cochrane Review found that CBT led to a small but significant reduction in disability and distress.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
This has some things in common with CBT but also uses mindfulness techniques. And while CBT focuses on changing the way people think about their pain, ACT helps people accept their pain and commit to lifestyle changes that will lessen its effects.
Such changes are standard advice for conditions like high blood pressure, and they can be helpful for treating chronic pain, too. Physical inactivity, stress, and poor sleep are all linked to more severe chronic pain. ACT also helps people distill what matters most to their quality of life, such as family time, and then figure out which actions can facilitate that despite the pain. A 2022 review of 25 trials found that ACT helped reduce disability and depression and improve quality of life.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
People with chronic pain that has no identifiable cause—such as fibromyalgia and some back pain—may become overly sensitive to stimuli such as pressure or heat, a process called central sensitization. Pain resulting from altered pain processing “means there’s no clear injury or nerve damage,” says Christopher Robinson, MD, PhD, a physician-scientist in the department of anesthesiology, perioperative, and pain medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Pain reprocessing therapy is an emerging technique that helps the brain “unlearn” this type of pain. Therapists have people engage in movement they fear will cause pain—such as bending—while training them to perceive their sensations as the result of nondangerous brain activity rather than tissue damage. It aims to silence what may be thought of as a false alarm from the nervous system.
A 2021 clinical trial found that two-thirds of people with chronic back pain who received four weeks of pain reprocessing therapy were pain-free or nearly pain-free after treatment.
Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in the February 2025 issue of Consumer Reports On Health.
