According to Dr. Mauro Zappaterra, pain management specialist, every living creature experiences pain. It is described in the leading textbook Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation as “a subjective and entirely individual personal experience influenced by learning, context and multiple psychosocial variables.” If pain is an experience, totally unique to you, can you change your pain and how you feel?

Yes.

Because pain is an experience, many factors influence that experience: emotions, sleep, attention, genetics. As technology has improved, we have learned more about the areas of the brain that are activated when a person experiences a painful stimulus. Surprisingly, many of those areas of the brain are important in processing emotions and attention. Therefore, the pain experience can be modulated—turned up or turned down, as if you were adjusting the volume dial on the radio—by working with your emotions and your attention.

For more on how to work with your emotions and attention to diminish your pain, and to read all of Dr. Zappaterra’s foreword to our new book Create to Heal for Pain, please click here.