Better Pain Free: Using Your Mind to Overcome Pain

In this episode we discuss the impact of the mind on how we perceive and manage chronic pain. We have all heard the concept of mind over matter and the importance of having the right mindset to overcome adversity and to succeed.  But can your state of mind impact how you actually experience pain?  And to that extent, can psychotherapy teach your mind to process chronic pain differently so as to make it less debilitating? Now in asking these questions, we are in no way implying that pain is “all in your head.”  Rather, we are exploring if and how the mind can be trained to perceive and process pain signals from the rest of the body in a way that makes living with chronic pain manageable. To answer these questions we spoke to a researcher who has been studying this fascinating topic and whose recently published, groundbreaking study has yielded some pretty dramatic results.  Dr.Tor Wager is the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Cognitive Psychology in 2003, and served as an Assistant (2004-2008) and Associate Professor (2009) at Columbia University, and as Associate (2010-2014) and Full Professor (2014-2019) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since 2004, he has directed the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory, a research lab devoted to work on the neurophysiology of affective processes—pain, emotion, stress, and empathy—and how they are shaped by cognitive and social influences.