Can Mindfulness Reduce Physical Pain?

Mindfulness is becoming widely known within the health and wellbeing sector and for good reason. Its benefits seem to show no bounds, scientific study has seen people reaping rewards including greater clarity and focus, improved relationships, memory enhancement and even physical pain reduction.

I strongly believe in the results of mindfulness training having experienced them first hand and from information gathered during client feedback sessions. There is no doubt that these studies have strong tangible outcomes. However, there had always been a doubt arising for me when it came to mindfulness and physical pain. How possible is it for us to outsmart our physical body? Can we overrule the brain when in excruciating pain and it is possible that if we focus on discomfort it could help to ease it?

I was never really sure until I received a phone call from a client who had recently experienced cardiac arrest. This particular client had no immediate family and limited external sources of strength. In the moments when she was going through this difficult experience she told me that she had used her mindfulness training to navigate her way through the emotional turmoil and physical discomfort she was experiencing.

This information blew me away. I was astounded that in a short four week programme she had channelled everything she had learnt and when the time came in the ultimate discomfort and unease she used the techniques and they gave her some form of reassurance and inner strength to get through a life threatening and physically painful situation.

This lead to thinking about what limits mindfulness actually has within a physical sense and I began to do some further research. Mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn found during the 1985 clinical study that when patients experiencing chronic pain were able to detach the physical sensation from pain with their reaction they were able to form healthier responses and in turn, suffer less.

The idea is that mindfulness can be used not to remove the physical pain but to reduce the psychological experience related to the pain by cultivating the ability to separate the physical sensory dimension of the pain and the judgement attached to it constructing the way in which it is experienced.

Pain is complex, multidimensional and subjective to the person. When we experience a pain we automatically label it as a negative experience and want to remove it entirely. We conjure up ways to get rid of the pain all the time labelling it as bad and something which needs to be removed. It is this attachment and judgement to pain which intensifies it making the experience far more uncomfortable than the physical sensation itself.

Now I appreciate that this sounds a lot easier than it actually is. Physical chronic pain can be one of the most difficult things to navigate through however if we can work on our minds it is a nice possibility that when pain arises we may be able to work with it to find a source of strength in an undesirable unchangeable situation.

Tell me about your experience of mindfulness and pain management in the comments below and sign up to receive emails if you would like to know more.