Pain Acceptance rather than Catastrophising influences work goal pursuit & achievement

We all know that having pain can act as a disincentive to doing things. What’s less clear is how, when a person is in chronic pain, life can continue. After all, life doesn’t stop just because pain is a daily companion. I’ve been interested in how people maintain living well despite their pain, because I think if we can work this out, some of the ongoing distress and despair experienced by people living with pain might be alleviated (while we wait for cures to appear).

The problem with studying daily life is that it’s complicated. What happened yesterday can influence what we do today. How well we sleep can make a difference to pain and fatigue. Over time, these changes influences can blur and for people living with pain it begins to be difficult to work out which came first: the pain, or the life disruption. Sophisticated mathematical procedures can now be used to model the effects of variations in individual’s experiences on factors that are important to an overall group. For example, if we track pain, fatigue and goals in a group of people, we can see that each person’s responses vary around their own personal “normal”. If we then add some additional factors, let’s say pain acceptance, or catastrophising, and look to see firstly how each individual’s “normal” varies with their own acceptance or catastrophising, then look at how overall grouped norms vary with these factors while controlling for the violation of usual assumptions in this kind of statistical analysis (like independence of each sample, for example), we can begin to examine the ways that pain, or goal pursuit vary depending on acceptance or catastrophising across time.

In the study I’m looking at today, this kind of multilevel modelling was used to examine the variability between pain intensity and positive and negative feelings and pain interference with goal pursuit and progress, as well as looking to see whether pain acceptance or catastrophising mediated the same outcomes.

The researchers found that pain intensity interfered with goal progress, but it didn’t do this directly. Instead, it did this via the individual’s perception of how much pain interfered with goal pursuit. In other words, when a person thinks that pain gets in the way of them doing things, this happens when they experience higher pain intensity that makes them feel that it’s hard to keep going with goals. Even if people feel OK in themselves, pain intensity makes it feel like it’s much harder to keep going.

But, what’s really interesting about this study is that pain acceptance exerts an independent influence on the strength of this relationship, far more than pain catastrophising (or thinking the worst). What this means is that even if pain intensity gets in the way of wanting to do things, people who accept their pain as part of themselves are more able to keep going.

The authors of this study point out that “not all individuals experience pain’s interference with goal pursuit to the same extent because interference is likely to depend on pain attitudes” (Mun, Karoly & Okun, 2015), and accepting pain seems to be one of the important factors that allow people to keep going. Catastrophising, as measured in this study, didn’t feature as a moderator, which is quite unusual, and the authors suggest that perhaps their using “trait” catastrophising instead of “state” catastrophising might have fuzzed this relationship, and that both forms of catastrophising should be measured in future.

An important point when interpreting this study: acceptance does not mean “OMG I’m just going to ignore my pain” or “OMG I’m just going to distract myself”. Instead, acceptance means reducing unhelpful brooding on pain, or trying to control pain (which just doesn’t really work, does it). Acceptance also means “I’m going to get on with what makes me feel like me” even if my pain goes up because I do. The authors suggest that acceptance might reduce pain’s disruptive influence on cognitive processes, meaning there’s more brain space to focus on moving towards important goals.

In addition to the cool finding that acceptance influences how much pain interferes with moving towards important goals, this study also found that being positive, or feeling good also reduced pain interference. Now this is really cool because I’ve been arguing that having fun is one of the first things that people living with chronic pain lose. And it’s rarely, if ever, included in pain management or rehabilitation approaches. Maybe it’s time to recognise that people doing important and fun things that they value might actually be a motivating approach that could instill confidence and “stickability” when developing rehabilitation programmes.

Mun CJ, Karoly P, & Okun MA (2015). Effects of daily pain intensity, positive affect, and individual differences in pain acceptance on work goal interference and progress. Pain, 156 (11), 2276-85 PMID: 26469319