Self monitoring – focusing on pain too much? or an essential part of living with pain?

I was just a tiny bit surprised when I looked at the results of my self-management strategy survey: self monitoring was smack bang in the middle of the list! Take a look yourself – Self monitoring is not something we discuss much in pain management circles. It’s like ‘Oooh if you keep noticing your pain you’re fixating on it and that’s bad!’ and yet I suspect it forms part of the background interoceptive awareness that most of us do whether we live with pain or not. Let’s take a deeper look at it. The ‘definition’ I used was ‘noticing your pain intensity, thoughts, activities and varying your expectations so you can do what really matters’ – in other words, being aware of how you’re feeling (noticing) and making deliberate decisions about where to spend your energy/time. Interoception is a fundamental process in body awareness and homeostasis. Quigley and colleagues (2021) describe a function of interoception as ‘signaling about the body’s energy status, which then drives the behaviours needed to renew energy resources’ (Quigley, et al., 2021). Philosophical questions about assumed functions aside, the term is used to refer to ‘the overall process of how the nervous system (central and automatic) sense, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape across c...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Coping Skills Coping strategies biopsychosocial Chronic pain interoception pain management Research Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs