Mindfulness and managing chronic pain
Yoga and mindfulness are practices in disruption.
Yoga poses help us focus on the physical body, aligning joints to keep them safe, engaging relevant muscles to find strength and stability while relaxing others to deepen the pose. Finding the balance between these active and passive connections in our body, requires just about all of our attention, leaving no space for habitual thoughts.
Mindfulness is the awareness of this connection we make with our bodies, whether through visualization or sensation (more on that in another blog). And its ability to disrupt your brain’s usual stream of consciousness. Through practice, connecting with ourselves becomes more natural, sharpening our ability to shift thoughts.
It’s the perfect tool for pain management and that’s probably why the number of people using yoga to help treat chronic pain has tripled in the past decade, according to a National Institutes of Health survey. Disruption works!
It can be very easy to focus on pain. It’s sharp, it’s hot, it’s demanding your attention. After all, that’s how we identify problems in our body. (Side note: you should never feel pain in your yoga practice. Make the pose work for your body and not the other way around). But when pain persists post-treatment, we need to become better at redirecting our attention.
When we focus on pain we notice it more, it’s that simple. Yoga doesn’t just teach us how to shift the focus away from pain, it teaches us how to relax around it. As we build physical awareness, we might begin to better identify (and manage) those pain triggers.
And, of course, there’s the physical aspect. Yoga relaxes tight muscles, keeps our joints mobile and builds muscle—all things that can ease pain.
Research has found that yoga really does work for reducing pain. Though it remains unclear if that’s because of the physical or mental aspect of yoga.
When it comes to arthritis, for example, more than a dozen studies of more than 1500 participants with knee arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis found that yoga may help reduce symptoms.
Another smaller study of people with rheumatoid arthritis showed a reduction in inflammation, which helped reduce overall symptoms.
Whether relief comes from the yoga poses or overall health improvements , yoga played an important role.