Let it Be: Mindful Acceptance Reduces Pain and Emotion
This study from 2020 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/14/11/1147/5716281 shows how the role of accepting pain and negative emotions reduces the intensity of both these things. One of the primary things I talk about is letting chronic pains and emotions move through you and be felt vs. pushing these things away or trying to fix them. This is in opposition to what many people and healthcare practitioners try to do with treating ongoing pains and chronic somatic symptoms. Chronic pain is typically more emotional than physical in nature so we want to look at it more like an emotion than like a physical acute injury type of pain. With emotions, all feelings are meant to be felt and feeling is healing. To be healthy, we want to feel our emotions fully to process them. So letting the pains (emotions) be felt fully through mindful acceptance is the answer vs. trying to fight or flee from them. When we do that we are just adding more sympathetic nervous system activity to what is already an overactive fight or flight state. Check out my latest youtube video which also talks about this- ‘Blocking your feelings is blocking your healing’.
