Coping With Pain: Psychological Strategies for Success - Essay Sample

Introduction

Different ways are usually applied to help people cope with pain. Though the use of drugs such as pain killers are important is helping people to relieve pain, psychological strategies have been proved to be very much effective. They usually help in excellent functioning of pain killers that people take when they are in pain. The implication is that our perception about pain determines how well we can cope with pain.

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Psychological state and cognitive style is the best strategy for coping with pain. This depends on the fact that our moods can influence our pain. When we are in pain, being in mood such as sadness, fearful or being depressed can make an individual unable to cope with pain. On the contrary, when a person feels relaxed, happy and focused, he/she will experience less pain. This style of dealing with pain makes people avoid harmful activities that can affect their moods. For example, thinking that one has no control over pain can be detrimental in the attitudes and hence, one will be unable to cope with pain. Excessively dwelling on pain, feeling worthless and blaming oneself are also negative behaviours that can make someone feel more pain (Gurung, 2019). However, Psychological state and cognitive style can help to reduce these detrimental effects hence assisting people to be able to cope with pain.

Different ways of coping with pain have some pros and cons that make them useful in some cases and infective in others. Distraction is among the psychological methods that have been proved effective in coping with pain. It involves trying to divert your mind from the pain using aspects such as pleasing scenario. Advantage of using this method is that it can help an individual cope with pain by not thinking about it. However, its disadvantage is that it can only be used as a short time strategy for coping with pain (Gurung, 2019).

Hypnosis is the other method of coping with stress. It comes from a Greek word hypnosis, which means sleep. As such, incorporate self-fulfilling prophesy and distraction. Its advantage is that it helps someone to focus on a particular definite issue that will make him/her feel relaxed and forget his pain. Besides, it can also be used to help people on pain to sleep comfortably (Turk & Gatchel, 2018). But its disadvantage is that people with negative minds cannot use it.

The general cognitive method is also another method of coping with pain. It involves activities such as meditation, mindfulness, guided imagery and relaxation. The advantage of using this method is that it reduces anxiety and muscle tensions that cause pain. Advantage of using this strategy is that it can help to alleviate some negative thoughts that can make an individual unable to cope with pain. For example, it can be used by kidney disease patients who hold a negative perception that being prescribed to use painkillers daily mean that they are in the last stage. This might make them unable to cope with pain, which can only be solved by general cognitive method (Gurung, 2019). Its disadvantage is that it cannot be used in dealing with pain among young children.

What you see matters is another pain-coping method. According to this strategy, being is a place where you can view the green environment such as grocery may be through the window help people to easily cope with pain. Besides, using virtual reality VR can help to create a distraction making a patient experience less pain. The advantage of using this method is that it is easy to place an individual in a position that he/she can effectively view and interact with nature or manipulate what he/she sees by use of VR. However, the demerit of this method is that while some nature help in reducing pain, others such as lightning and thunderstorms can be detrimental and increase pain (Gurung, 2019).

Psychological methods of coping with pain are very effective. They can be used alone or to reinforce other medical treatment. However, most of them depend on the mindset of an individual. Positive mind and being pessimistic nature improve an individual coping nature. Nevertheless, some strategies are effective in specific situations but not in others. Similarly, particular methods favour a particular age group but not the other. Choosing the best approach is hence, essential.

References

Gurung, R. A. R. (2019). Health Psychology: Well-being in a diverse World (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Turk, D. C., & Gatchel, R. J. (Eds.). (2018). Psychological approaches to pain management: A practitioner's handbook. Guilford publications.