Reframing: Working with Thoughts
Living with pain can impact the way that you think. Thinking is also impacted by symptoms like fatigue and depressed mood. Such symptoms often generate negative or unhelpful thoughts. These thoughts may be about the way pain has affected your life, about how pain has changed the way you see yourself, or about how things will be for you in the future.
What you think can similarly contribute to a worsening of your symptoms. Negative thoughts produce negative emotions which in turn influence how potential pain signals get processed in the brain. The goal of this module is to help you learn how to change unhelpful thoughts so that they do not get in the way of living your best life.
What is Reframing?
Understanding how thoughts affect pain
How to Reframe Your Thoughts
Practical techniques for reframing
Three Approaches to Managing Thoughts
An important strategy for managing thoughts is called "reframing." A person who uses this strategy works to balance their way of thinking so that it is not overly negative. This requires three key steps:
1) Identifying the negative thoughts, 2) Challenging the negative thoughts, and 3) Developing alternative thoughts that more accurately reflect reality.
Reframing is not about creating an artificially positive scenario. It's about having thoughts that more accurately reflect the evidence.
This alternative strategy is to let the negative thoughts remain but to recognize that thoughts are simply fleeting ideas. Your thoughts do not define you. Your thoughts do not necessarily define what is really going on.
Instead of owning thoughts, we can have them, acknowledge their presence, and allow them to pass through without grabbing our focus. You might add a stem to the thought by saying "I am having the thought that..." This isolates the thought for what it is – "just a thought."
An additional strategy is to deliberately think positive, realistic, helpful thoughts. When feeling stressed or uncomfortable, you can coach yourself through the situation by focusing on thoughts that you find reassuring, centering, motivating, or helpful. These are sometimes called "coping thoughts".
Examples: "I know there are things I can do to manage my pain." "I have been through difficult things before and know I will get through this." "This, too, will pass." "Take a slow, deep breath."
Catastrophizing: Excessive worry and/or prediction of a worst-case outcome. Black and white thinking: Seeing only two possible outcomes – one very good and one very bad. Ignoring the Positive: Focusing on negative events while ignoring positive events. Prediction: Deciding how an event will turn out before it happens. Should Statements: Thoughts like "I should do this" or "I must do that" that cause pressure and stress.