Pain Thoughts:
Identifying and replacing thoughts that are not helpful

Summary: What do I need to know?

Thoughts about pain often happen automatically.
Thinking about pain often can make pain worse.
With practice, you can pause and recognize when you're having negative thoughts about your pain.
You may be able to change those thoughts into thoughts that are more helpful.
- Here is one example of how to do that:
- Unhelpful - "When my pain is bad, I can't do anything."
- Helpful - "Even when my pain is bad, I can still do small things that are meaningful to me."

Thinking about how much pain you are in does not help you cope with the pain; as pain increases, thoughts may become more negative; as thoughts become more negative, pain often increases further.

This page introduces some examples of negative thoughts, some categories of negative thoughts, and some effects of negative thoughts.

Negative thoughts can lead to:

Isolating/avoiding others

Worsening mood

More stress

Avoiding activities

What can you do to help with pain thoughts?

Although pain thoughts can be automatic, with practice you can become more aware when you have them.

Then you can replace unhelpful thoughts with ones that are helpful. One patient found this technique beneficial:

Patient Experience - Jessica, stage 4 oral cancer

"Sometimes I can just take a pause, and recognize that these are just thoughts and they aren't going to make me feel better. This really helps me in the moment."