Welcome to the continuing series Why You Should See a Pain Management Psychiatrist.  This week we’ll look at behavior changes that can help you live better and get better.

1. Do positive activities

It’s important that you keep up activities when you have chronic pain.  A pain management psychiatric will help you with pacing, which is not doing too much nor too little.  A clever idea is using the concept of $1 to help you pace yourself.  You’ll also learn how you can get yourself to regularly do your assigned physical therapy exercises.

2. Alter old activities or choose new ones

A pain management psychiatrist will work with you to figure out what activities you can do, what you should avoid, and, if you need to, how to replace or alter favorite activities so you can still do them.

Let’s say you love gardening, but you can’t do as much as you once did.  It’s important not to drop something you really enjoy.  So figure out what aspect of gardening you love.  If it’s seeing green by your front door, try container gardening instead of doing the whole frontyard.  If it’s being outside, garden for 15 minutes instead of 5 hours, then sit in or walk through a garden to enjoy the outdoors.  You get the idea – alter what you need to, so you can continue to enjoy your favorites.

These changes in behavior help in several ways:

• you focus on what you can do
• you avoid having pain determine what your life is like
• you focus on living, rather than pain
• your nervous system benefits, too, by having signals from normal activity compete with pain signals

Other articles in this series:

1. Why comprehensive treatment works better
2. Benefits of a psychiatric evaluation
3. Treatment of psychiatric symptoms
4. Using psychiatric medications for pain
5. Learning psychological skills
6. Making positive behavioral changes
7. Making positive psychological changes
8. Benefits of supportive therapy
9. Benefits of a pain support group
10. New brain-based treatments