Episode #107- Pain Catastrophizing

Today's Episode is about Pain Catastrophizing- what it is and how it affects your symptoms.

 

People with high levels of pain catastrophizing are more likely to develop a new acute pain, more likely for their acute pain to turn chronic.  And who catastrophize more before surgery are more likely to have complications and a slower recovery.

 

Here are the 13 questions on the Pain Catastrophizing Scale.  Rate from 0 (not at all) to 4 (all of the time) when you feel pain:

1. I worry all the time about whether the pain will end. 
2. I feel I can't go on. 
3. It's terrible and I think it's never going to get any better. 
4. It's awful and I feel that it overwhelms me.
5. I feel I can't stand it anymore. 
6. I become afraid that the pain may get worse. 
7. I think of other painful experiences. 
8. I anxiously want the pain to go away.  
9. I can't seem to keep it out of my mind. 
10. I keep thinking about how much it hurts. 
11. I keep thinking about how badly I want the pain to stop. 
12. There is nothing I can do to reduce the intensity of the pain. 
13. I wonder whether something serious may happen. 

A score over 37 means you tend to catastrophize how you think of your pain.

 

What is the solution for pain catastrophizing?

 

Mindfulness- being in the present moment!

There are ways to interpret your pain differently, like through somatic tracking or sending yourself messages of safety

 

Somatic strategies to calm the nervous system will help decrease pain catastrophizing.

 

So listen in for this quick summary of pain catastrophizing and how to rewire it!

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 107, Pain Catastrophizing. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my loves. Today, we are going to talk about pain catastrophizing, what that is and what the research shows about it. So pain catastrophizing is a way that they measure the way you think about your pain.
What they found in research is that people's views on pain, the way they think about their pain and talk about their pain actually influences how much pain they have. This totally makes sense with neuroscience because of the pain-fear cycle. If you want to learn more about that, you can listen back to episode 69, the pain-fear pain cycle.
And I talk a little bit about pain catastrophizing there, but I wanted to make a quick little episode about pain catastrophizing today because I think it's so helpful just to hear the kind of statements that they use in the pain catastrophizing scale so that you can be aware of when you're catastrophizing about your pain and decrease that to decrease your pain. The pain catastrophizing scale is given to patients where they rate from zero, which is not at all, to four, which is all the time. How much they think about these types of thoughts when they have pain.
It's only 13 questions, so I'll read them to you. Here are the 13 statements on the pain catastrophizing scale. I worry all the time about whether the pain will end.
I feel I can't go on. It's terrible, and I think it's never gonna get any better. It's awful, and I feel that it overwhelms me.
I feel I can't stand it anymore. I become afraid that the pain may get worse. I think of other painful experiences.
I anxiously want the pain to go away. I can't seem to keep it out of my mind. I keep thinking about how much it hurts.
I keep thinking about how badly I want the pain to stop. There's nothing I can do to reduce the intensity of the pain. I wonder whether something serious may happen.
These sound like normal things that people who are in pain, and especially in chronic pain, would think. But what the research shows is that people who score higher on pain catastrophizing also are more likely to get new acute pains. They're more likely for their acute pains to turn chronic.
And people who catastrophize more before surgery are more likely to have complications and delays with their healing. So notice with yourself, do you tend to think these type of thoughts? And how frequently do you think them?
Even if they seem true, even if you could prove them, they are not helpful to think. They're actually amping up the danger signal and dysregulating the nervous system to think these kinds of thoughts. So what is the solution to catastrophizing?
It's mindfulness. So episode 70, I talk about mindfulness and give you some examples and give you some examples of different ways to think about your symptoms. But one good example of mindfulness is somatic tracking.
You may have heard the term somatic tracking. It's very similar to a way I learned as a life coach to process emotions and what they do in somatic experiencing to process trauma. And basically, it's going into the body, just describing what is going on in real time with general neutral words.
So instead of saying, I have a lot of anxiety right now, or I have a migraine right now, you might say, I have a tightness in the chest and a rapid heartbeat, or I have a pulsing sensation in this part of my head. So you just describe it neutrally. You see, if you visualize a shape or a color to it, is it moving?
Is it warm or cold? These types of things bring you to the present moment. You're not thinking about the future.
You're not thinking about the past, and you're able to calm the nervous system. When you get into more of that relaxed rest and repair state, you're actually able to decrease those pain signals. Your brain is not on high alert and creating more and more of them.
Now, I'll give you a few suggestions for thoughts you might want to try on instead. You could notice if you're catastrophizing, just be the observer at first. You could label, oh, there's my brain catastrophizing, and then you want to send your brain messages of safety.
You want to be in the present moment. You want to describe things neutrally, just as they are. So you could say things like part of me is feeling scared.
My brain interpreted this signal as dangerous, but I'm safe. It takes time for my nervous system to heal, and that's okay. I'm learning to take care of myself.
I am here. This is happening. I'm working on getting physically and mentally stronger.
This too shall pass. There may be other thoughts that are soothing to you. One of my favorites is just you are safe.
You're safe. It's amazing how often I tell that to myself because my primitive brain likes to be very reactive. It's always on the lookout for danger, and my survival responses are constantly kicking in.
And when I feel that dysregulation in my body, I tell myself, I'm safe. I look around the room. You can actually look and name objects that you see.
You can think of things that you smell and taste and touch. Tuning into your senses or many of the other somatic approaches that are out there for calming the body and the nervous system can also be helpful to come back to the present moment when you're catastrophizing. If you want help with pain catastrophizing or any of the other pain reprocessing or emotional processing techniques that I teach, I would love to be your coach.
There are some different options that I have for a group membership, for a few limited spots of one-on-one coaching. And if you'd like to check that out more, just feel free to click on the information in the show notes. And right now, I'm offering a free 60-minute consultation with me so that you can talk to me about your specific situation and see if coaching might be a good fit for you.
Thanks for listening. Have a great week. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.