Our attention to pain is highly variable and can influence how bad it feels. Research suggests that improved psychological approaches could help lessen suffering for the millions of people around the world who experience chronic pain.
Between 10 to 20% of people in Europe live with some form of chronic pain. It is a growing problem that significantly reduces quality of life, often leads to early retirement, and places an economic burden on individuals and society.
Drug options for chronic pain are limited and their long-term use can cause serious side effects.
Psychological approaches to coping with pain could offer a safer alternative.
Research into how we process pain in everyday life, coordinated by researchers at the University of Luxembourg, set out to challenge the conventional assumption that our tendency to pay attention to pain is stable and consistent. Its findings suggest this feature, known as ‘attentional bias for pain information’, varies widely depending on the attention devoted to other activities.
Previous studies of the effect of attention on pain have been conducted in laboratory settings, which can fail to catch how the complexities and ever-changing nature of everyday life affect how we experience pain.
This project moved research out of the lab and into the real world.
The researchers asked volunteers to over-exercise so that they felt stiffness and discomfort. Then, they applied vibrating pads of varying intensity to the painful and non-painful areas as the volunteers went about their day.
The investigation probed the link between what people were doing and how painful they found the vibrations to reveal when people felt most attuned to the sensations.
The key conclusion was that the attention participants gave to pain depended on what other aspects of daily life they were paying attention to. It suggests that focusing on urgent needs, such as collecting children from school or preparing for an exam, significantly reduces the attention we give pain.
Psychological approaches for controlling the attention we give to everyday activities could therefore be used to better manage our experience of chronic pain, without relying on drugs.