A life of chronic pain is accompanied by a number of difficult emotions: feelings of loss, anger, fear, sadness, to name a few - so much of the time our physical pain is matched by emotional pain. It can consume your life if you let it.

Focusing only on negative thoughts, or pushing them away altogether, can increase both our intensity of pain and our perception of pain - our pain mindset can actually make us hurt more! Thankfully there are mindset shifts we can make that help us to take charge and regain control of our pain and our life.

Increasingly, research shows that leaning into our emotions can be good for our health and, conversely, keeping them pushed down and locked away can actually worsen the ‘negative’ ones. It takes courage to move towards emotional pain but if we don’t shy away from it and allow ourselves to truly feel our feelings, all of them, surprisingly we can reap rewards of a more peaceful, and happier existence.

Here I briefly outline four pain-mindset-shift strategies.