Mindfulness in Therapy II - the effect of mindfulness practices on therapy
After clarifying what we understand under the term „mindfulness“, let’s look at what role it plays in therapy and why I believe bringing it closer to patients, especially those with chronic pain issues is so beneficial.
Regardless of what specific problem you show up with in therapy, the majority goes along with pain and signs of inflammation, some more visible than others. From a swollen knee after a ligament rupture, to back pain after a disc hernia or chronic diseases like fibromyalgia, all of them show inflammatory processes that can be seen in an increase of certain hormones and factors in our blood. As a Physiotherapist it is our job to first discover where these inflammations are originating from, then work out a plan to ideally eliminate them and support the body’s healing process in the best possible way, and ideally prevent the patient from reoccurring issues. Colleagues have been doing this successfully for years and years, but the journey is often a long one, therefor wouldn’t it be nice to speed up the healing process a bit and help especially chronic patients to deal with their pain better?
To understand why mindfulness practices can help, we need to understand some simple links.
Inflammation is noticed as pain, while pain is a stress factor for our body, therefore hormones change in our blood.
During meditation, the body is releasing different hormones that have the amazing ability to work opposing the stress hormones, Noradrenalin, Cortisol, and Adrenalin, which are commonly produced while we experience pain or due to the psychological stress that we feel when chronic pain holds us back from participating in day-to-day life.
The more stress we have, the slower the healing process will be - that is the conclusion of several studies. Because we are adding more stress hormones to an already challenged body. Imagine having a desk full of work, you need all your energy to get to the bottom but while you are trying to do this the most annoying colleague is relentlessly talking to you, distracting you and adding more small things to your to-do list. This is stress on top of stress.
Whereas the more content and centered we are the more anti-stress hormones we create, which inhibit inflammatory factors and calm down the immune system. An ability that is especially important for many chronic diseases, that sprout on the ground of an overreaction of the immune system. Coming back to our mental picture, your annoying colleague would be on holiday but your favourite colleague is on your side, supporting you with enough water to drink and making sure that nobody is interrupting you.
But meditation doesn’t only help on the physical level. By working on an observant mind during mindfulness, and learning to not categorize feelings and emotions, patients can see the link between their thoughts and their body’s reaction to them. As soon we also learn to not label pain as a „pleasant“ or „unpleasant“ feeling, we will make the experience that the level of pain is significantly lower. Although a short-time meditation practice can not eliminate the pain attacks of chronic patients, it can provenly advance the quality of life and diminish the feeling of being a victim of their pain.
When we sum this up, we see that we can only succeed by adding a mindfulness practice. There is no harm that we can do to our patients and we can introduce them to a tool that helps them to deal better with their pain and speed up the healing process of acute injuries or surgeries.
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