How does chronic pain affect mental health?

If you’ve ever stubbed your toe or burned your hand on a hot pan, chances are your immediate reaction was to instinctively recoil, yell, jump, or swear. The pain distracts you from engaging in whatever activity you were trying to do prior to stubbing your toe or burning your hand, and it might keep you from accomplishing your task. It will sour your mood and can completely alter any energy and momentum you might have had. Now imagine having this experience every day, sometimes all day, while also trying to reconcile the possibility that the pain may not end.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know what it’s like living with chronic pain. Perhaps you or someone you love can relate to the experience of carrying the heaviness of chronic pain each day. Living with chronic pain can make you acutely aware of how closely the body and mind are linked, as the experience of daily physical suffering directly impacts your happiness and emotional suffering. And as both physical and psychological anguish increases, the rest of your life may change as well, socially, leisurely, occupationally, financially, academically, and with transportation, mobility, and accessibility.

Effects of Chronic Pain on Mental Health

Through the study of this mind-body connection over the past few decades, research has begun to scratch the surface on how pain affects your psychological well-being. Chronic pain can lead to higher rates of depression as you reduce physical activity levels, pull back from relationships, and focus attention on easing the pain rather than engaging in hobbies and activities of daily living. The experience of chronic pain can be very isolating, as your energy and attention move away from relationships and into caring for your body. Also, it can feel like others are unable to relate and don’t understand what you’re going through.

Similarly, it is common for folks living with pain to experience increased anxiety, as the idea of living with that pain every day and not having a “solution” or “cure” becomes overwhelming. It is common for folks living with chronic pain to ask those existential questions like “What is my life going to look like now that I have this?”, “Can I ever go back to my old life?”, and “What’s the point if I have to live this way every day?” As some of these questions pop up, pain may make you feel less hope, less in control, less powerful, or less worthy too. Further, not knowing what’s going on in your own body or fear of certain medical procedures or treatment can build apprehension. Pain can cause you to stiffen the muscles and activate the Fight/Flight/Freeze stress response, leaving you to feel tense, on-edge, and irritable. Pain may make it difficult to fall or stay asleep, leading you to feel more exhausted, burnt out, and ill-tempered.

Chronic pain also affects your thinking too. Folks living with pain often report a “brain fog” or “haziness” to their thinking on high pain days, meaning the ability to focus and concentrate deteriorates, and the ability to complete even common household tasks disappears.

Just as this relationship moves in one direction, it also moves the other way too. Worse mental health, increased depression, intensified anxiety, and higher stress all can exacerbate the intensity of your pain.

What You Can Do To Care For Your Mental Health If Living With Chronic Pain

Back to basics

Take care of your body as much as you can, focusing on sleep, healthy eating, physical movement, and avoiding mood-altering substances.  Try to build a sleep hygiene routine that helps you fall and stay asleep in order to get higher quality sleep. Talk with your physician or a dietitian about healthy eating habits and how your food intake may affect your pain and mental health. Implement a regular physical activity regimen to help loosen muscles, keep muscles conditioned, and increase endorphins. Talk with your physician about what type of physical activities are right for you to ensure you won’t increase pain or cause injury. Finally, try to avoid any substance or chemicals that might change your mood, energy, and motivation in negative ways, such as alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, or others.

Talk with your care team

Talk with each member of your care team about what they can do to support you in adapting to living with chronic pain. From primary care physicians, pain specialists, rheumatologists, and psychiatrists to physicians’ assistants, case managers, social workers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and psychologists, work with each person to identify what treatments they can offer, what skills they can teach, and what resources they have access to that may help you in creating a meaningful life while living with pain.

Be gentle with yourself

Allow yourself to slow down at times - living with pain is grueling and exhausting some days. You may feel that you don’t have “any more spoons left to give,” meaning there’s no energy or motivation after dealing with pain to attend to relationships, responsibilities, or interests. By cultivating a compassionate inner voice and allowing yourself to slow down, you’re less likely to judge and treat yourself with contempt, disdain, and hatred. By treating yourself with self-compassion, you’re more likely to engage in activities that align with your values and increase your self-worth.

And of course, start therapy

When living with chronic pain, it can feel like your pain is driving your car, deciding what direction you go in life, leaving you feeling that you have no control over where your life is headed. Therapy can be a place where you can explore how to create changes so that you feel you are driving your car instead of your pain and heading in the direction you want.  Within therapy, you can learn to manage the relationship between your chronic pain and mental health, build awareness of what contributes to pain, figure out how to re-engage in important relationships, learn to manage your care team and build assertiveness, modify thought patterns that make pain/depression/anxiety/etc. worse, answer some of those existential questions like “what now?” and “what’s the point?,” and find ways to engage in behaviors that help you live a meaningful life in line with your values.

If you want to talk more about how chronic pain and mental health affect each other or identify ways to help manage your pain and mental health, feel free to request a free, 15-minute consultation with CPGR to get started!