Alberta Health Services
Health Information
Chronic pain doesn’t just affect the body – it can also change your mood, energy levels, sleep, and overall mental well-being. While pain is a physical experience, the way we think, feel, and cope plays a big part in how we manage it day to day.
Mental health tools like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), breathing exercises, mindfulness, and keeping a pain diary can lower stress, improve how you deal with your emotions, and give you more control. These techniques are often used along with other pain treatments to support overall well-being.
Pain affects your body and mind. Tools like CBT, mindfulness, and breathing exercises can help you manage stress and cope more effectively.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of therapy that helps you understand how your thoughts, feelings, and actions are connected. When you live with chronic pain, it’s common to have negative thought patterns, such as feeling hopeless, expecting the worse, or focusing on pain in a way that makes it feel overwhelming. These thoughts can make you feel more upset and even make pain feel worse.
CBT teaches simple ways to spot and challenge unhelpful thoughts. When you replace negative thoughts with more balanced ones, you may feel less anxious, frustrated, or depressed about your pain. This change in thinking can help you cope better, feel more in control, and make pain easier to manage day to day.
If pain is making it hard to do daily tasks, let people know that you could use some help.
Learn ways to help you stay well and cope with a problem by changing how you think and behave.
Learn about letting go of negative emotions, like anger, sadness, resentment, and frustration.
We don’t usually think about our breathing, but pain or stress can change it. Breathing may become fast, shallow, or uneven. This can make your body tense and increase anxiety, which can make pain feel worse. Learning simple breathing exercises can help you slow down, relax your muscles, and calm your nervous system.
Breathing exercises, such as diaphragmatic breathing or box breathing, teach you how to slow down and control your breath in a way that helps your body and mind. Practicing these exercises can lower stress, improve focus, and help you feel calm when pain flares up. Over time, developing better breathing habits can be a powerful way to support other pain management strategies and boost your overall well-being.
Use this video to learn how to do mindfulness meditation through a guided breathing exercise.
3 easy deep breathing exercises to help relax your body and mind.
A simple breathing exercise to help you relax and feel less stressed.
Mindfulness means paying attention to what is happening right now, without judging it or getting distracted. If you live with pain, mindfulness can help you notice your feelings, thoughts, and body sensations as they come up. Instead of reacting automatically or trying to push the pain away, you simply observe it. This can create a sense of space between you and your pain, which may help reduce the emotional stress that often comes with chronic pain.
Practicing mindfulness regularly, through guided meditation, body scans, or gentle movement like yoga, can help you feel steadier and more focused. It teaches you to accept your experience, which can ease frustration and anxiety. Over time, mindfulness can make you more emotionally resilient and improve your quality of life by helping you develop a calmer, kinder relationship with your pain.
A series of audio recordings provided by the University of Alberta to guide the listener through relaxation and mindfulness exercises.
A fact sheet provided by Pain BC that includes information on mindfulness approach and extra resources to help.
A pain diary is a helpful tool for understanding your pain over time. By writing down when the pain starts, how strong it feels, what you were doing, how you felt, and what helps, you can start to see patterns.
Tracking your sleep, stress, medicines, and daily habits can also show connections you might miss in the moment. This information gives you a clearer picture of how pain affects your life and helps you and your healthcare team adapt treatments to support you better.
A pain diary can help you take a more active role in managing your pain.
Keeping a diary gives you clues about your pain—when it happens, what causes it, and what makes it better or worse.
Use the diary and pain scale to keep track of when you have pain, how bad it is, and what you are doing to treat it.
