Mindfulness For Health: A Practical Guide To Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress And Restoring Wellbeing

Name: Mindfulness For Health: A Practical Guide To Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress And Restoring Wellbeing
Author: Danny Penman & Vidyamala Burch
ISBN: 074995924X

by Danny Penman & Vidyamala Burch

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My fourth book is about mindfulness . Mindfulness for Health by Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman. I chose this one because a lot of my own difficulties with anxiety have been to do with managing chronic pain. I have a couple of health problems which mean I’m often in pain, most days, to varying degrees. So I read this book to try to understand and deal with that. Mindfulness is a very different approach to CBT in that CBT is about latching on to the anxious thought, figuring out what it is, breaking it down, and changing it; whereas mindfulness is almost the opposite of that, learning not to get caught up in your thoughts and letting them just wash over you. It’s interesting in that respect. I think if you don’t get on with CBT, mindfulness-based approaches can be useful to explore. “Beyond that limited benefit of identifying problems…worry is just a massive, massive waste of time” Both of the authors have had awful accidents, and both have used mindfulness to cope with chronic pain. The main thesis of their mindfulness approach to pain is that you have primary pain or primary suffering, which is the actual uncomfortable feeling in your body. But then you pile on top of that a lot of worry and distress about being in pain. You can’t make the primary pain go away, but there’s some room for movement with the secondary stuff, with your relationship with pain. Being in pain and not knowing when it’s going to come or how bad it’s going to be and how long it’s going to last for is a really worrying thing. But, if you add all that on top of the primary experience of pain, you make everything worse. So, it’s a book about trying to understand that you can’t make pain go away, but you can change your relationship with it, and that, by doing that, you end up making the pain less upsetting. Yes, exactly. And the Western word for that is de-centering—the idea that you are not your thoughts, and you can step back and watch them and not get tangled up in them. By changing that relationship with your thoughts, they have less power over you. The idea with mindfulness is that thoughts are just noise, passing mental events. And that’s very different from thinking, ‘Okay, I’m having a thought that my pain is getting worse. I’m going to go and write it down. What’s the evidence that it’s getting worse?’ Exactly. It depends on who you are and what you find helpful. I found it very useful to be aware of both approaches, because you can’t CBT your way out of everything. That’s why I wanted to include this book on mindfulness here. Sometimes things you’re worried about are real, they are really difficult situations. But there’s still room for movement in how you think about them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Definitely, yes. It’s funny, because I was in two minds about whether to admit it in this interview, because I don’t talk about my own experiences usually. I talk about them a bit in my book, because admitting that I’ve had my own difficulties made it easier to make the argument that I make in the book. But with this interview, in particular, I think it would be weird and wrong to talk about these books without saying why I’m personally endorsing them. They absolutely have been personally useful. Especially those first two, which I read when I was 20 and I had had no education whatsoever about what worry was or what to do about it. Only that it’s inspiring to read about people who have overcome such immensely difficult circumstances. I think that’s useful to have as part of the public conversation—to have examples to show that you can live a meaningful life, even in very difficult circumstances. Yes, to identify what your values are and figure out how you can achieve them and live them in spite of all the difficulties that you might be going through. That’s a central tenet of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) , which has lots of overlap with mindfulness approaches.

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Lucy Foulkes

"My fourth book is about mindfulness . Mindfulness for Health by Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman. I chose this one because a lot of my own difficulties with anxiety have been to do with managing chronic pain. I have a couple of health problems which mean I’m often in pain, most days, to varying degrees. So I read this book to try to understand and deal with that. Mindfulness is a very different approach to CBT in that CBT is about latching on to the anxious thought, figuring out what it is, breaking it down, and changing it; whereas mindfulness is almost the opposite of that, learning not to get caught up in your thoughts and letting them just wash over you. It’s interesting in that respect. I think if you don’t get on with CBT, mindfulness-based approaches can be useful to explore. “Beyond that limited benefit of identifying problems…worry is just a massive, massive waste of time” Both of the authors have had awful accidents, and both have used mindfulness to cope with chronic pain. The main thesis of their mindfulness approach to pain is that you have primary pain or primary suffering, which is the actual uncomfortable feeling in your body. But then you pile on top of that a lot of worry and distress about being in pain. You can’t make the primary pain go away, but there’s some room for movement with the secondary stuff, with your relationship with pain. Being in pain and not knowing when it’s going to come or how bad it’s going to be and how long it’s going to last for is a really worrying thing. But, if you add all that on top of the primary experience of pain, you make everything worse. So, it’s a book about trying to understand that you can’t make pain go away, but you can change your relationship with it, and that, by doing that, you end up making the pain less upsetting. Yes, exactly. And the Western word for that is de-centering—the idea that you are not your thoughts, and you can step back and watch them and not get tangled up in them. By changing that relationship with your thoughts, they have less power over you. The idea with mindfulness is that thoughts are just noise, passing mental events. And that’s very different from thinking, ‘Okay, I’m having a thought that my pain is getting worse. I’m going to go and write it down. What’s the evidence that it’s getting worse?’ Exactly. It depends on who you are and what you find helpful. I found it very useful to be aware of both approaches, because you can’t CBT your way out of everything. That’s why I wanted to include this book on mindfulness here. Sometimes things you’re worried about are real, they are really difficult situations. But there’s still room for movement in how you think about them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Definitely, yes. It’s funny, because I was in two minds about whether to admit it in this interview, because I don’t talk about my own experiences usually. I talk about them a bit in my book, because admitting that I’ve had my own difficulties made it easier to make the argument that I make in the book. But with this interview, in particular, I think it would be weird and wrong to talk about these books without saying why I’m personally endorsing them. They absolutely have been personally useful. Especially those first two, which I read when I was 20 and I had had no education whatsoever about what worry was or what to do about it. Only that it’s inspiring to read about people who have overcome such immensely difficult circumstances. I think that’s useful to have as part of the public conversation—to have examples to show that you can live a meaningful life, even in very difficult circumstances. Yes, to identify what your values are and figure out how you can achieve them and live them in spite of all the difficulties that you might be going through. That’s a central tenet of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) , which has lots of overlap with mindfulness approaches."

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