Stress Management as a Top Priority in Your Rehabilitation Process My Back Recovery: Recovering from Chronic Low Back Pain

Through relaxation you can break the vicious circle of pain and stress. This podcast takes you through some easy to learn methods of relaxation, helping it to become part of your daily life and improving your wellbeing. It also lists the benefits of meditation and looks at the supporting scientific evidence, examining why relaxation should be an integral component in your recovery.
 
Relaxation Relaxation is an integral component of cognitive behavioral treatment programs for chronic pain.1 Taking care of stress and anxiety as a chronic pain patient is crucial for your recovery.
 
Meditation  
Meditation is also a great way to built relaxation into your daily life. There are many different ways of practicing meditation and you have to find what works best for you.  

Many people enrich their lives through practicing meditation.
When you read interviews with successful CEO´s, entrepreneurs or celebrities who have incorporated meditation routines in their lives it is astonishing to see the huge benefits they experience.
 
Personal benefits of people who meditate regularly: more happiness
having more energy
having more creativity
living more efficiently
a better understanding of ones own emotions
more sensitivity to the feelings and emotions of others
more control over ones own emotions
less pressured by your experiences
less stressed
feeling more relaxed
more calming thoughts
control over your sensory filtering
improved memory and executive function
increased ability to concentrate
increased emotional intelligence
 
Thinking about relaxation, mindfulness and awareness during our recovery can’t be done without looking at some important evidence and thoughts about meditational practices:
Mindfulness meditation programs improve anxiety, depression and pain over the course of 2–6 months. The effects are comparable with those you can expect after taking antidepressants for the same period of time, but without the associated toxicities.2
47 placebo-controlled trials all found small to moderate improvements in pain, anxiety and depression. What is really great about this review (Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being from 2013) is that it demonstrates that the meditation group attained better results compared to the control group undertaking an equally intense treatment regarding focus and time, such as lectures, talks and art therapy sessions.
If we consider this evidence, then it seems a good reason to check out mindfulness for yourself and see if meditation could be something for you to try.
 
 
A definition of mindfulness Mindfulness has been described as a “non-elaborative, non-judgmental awareness” of present moment experience.3
Maybe you have heard of Zen, it´s very closely related to the mindfulness approach.
In general mindfulness techniques can be divided into two styles:
focused attention "Focused attention is associated with maintaining focus on a specific object, often the changing sensation or flow of the breath or an external object. When attention drifts from the object of focus to a distracting sensory, cognitive or emotional event, the practitioner is taught to acknowledge the event and to disengage from it by gently returning the attention back to the object of meditation".3
open monitoring "By contrast, open monitoring is associated with a non-directed acknowledgement of any sensory, emotional or cognitive event that arises in the mind. Zen meditation is considered to be one form of open monitoring practice. While practicing open monitoring, the practitioner experiences the current sensory or cognitive ‘event’ without evaluation, interpretation, or preference".3
 
Many guided meditation programs consist of a mix of those two styles. Often changing from one to the other within a meditation session.
I also think that it’s really important to know that clinical research into mindfulness has been going on since the early 1980s. For m