Research shows that people in pain benefit greatly when they have the skills, motivation and confidence to manage their own condition. With that in mind, people need to learn as much as they can from a range of skills, tools and exercises that enable them to take the lead role in managing their chronic pain.
CIRPD's Self-Management Toolkit
The self-management toolkit gives you tools and techniques to manage your pain. Our goal is to help you improve your life by translating pain research into practical every day activities. The useful assessment tool helps you measure your daily routine, life goals, and pain level. Get mindfulness and healthy living tips and strengthen your support network!
Learn how to:
- Build community
- Communicate with your social network
- Practice mindfulness
- Self-assess yourself
- Self-manage your pain
Our Process
Dr.'s Marc White and Kenneth D. Craig have spent over three decades researching pain management. They found that it is increasingly important for people to engage with their inner social circle during self-management. Joining forces with psychologist Cindy Wisebart, they wanted to create a toolkit that was accessible and helped people engage their social networks in the self-management process. Still in the development phase, the toolkit will be published as a subsite of CIRPD in 2012. It will include a dashboard where the user can login and confidentially track their progress online. Users will be able to connect with friends and family and share information about their progress.
Our Goals
- To empower you to take control over pain by providing you with tools and resources to make informed decisions about your health care.
- To help you communicate with health professionals, friends, and family in a positive way.
- To help you challenge your assumptions about pain and become more mindful of it.
- To help you manage your pain and improve your quality of life.
Pain Theory
These theories inform the exercises, tips, and techniques of CIRPD's self-management toolkit. They shed light on why humans respond to pain the way they do. By understanding these theories we can change the way we think about and manage pain.
Fear Avoidance and Catastrophic Thinking
Everyone wants to avoid pain. We are, in fact, biologically hard-wired to do so. Fear-avoidance is when a person tries to evade pain by avoiding movement or activities that cause it. Catastrophic thinking is the negative thought process that develops when you fear pain.
For example if you think: "if I experience even a little bit of pain, I could really injure myself, so I better avoid experiencing any pain”.
The problem with avoiding any problem, however, is that this can lead to a downward spiral resulting in more pain, poorer physical health, and increased disability.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a process by which you are aware and in touch with what is happening to yourself in the moment. Research suggests that mindfulness is the opposite of what happens when you try to avoid pain. Practicing mindfulness awareness exercises can increase your connection to living and improve your overall quality of life.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a theory which encourages you to play an active role in managing your pain by focusing on how you think, feel and act in the present. Pain techniques based on CBT help you help yourself to manage chronic pain. Research shows that CBT can help people deal with a variety of stress-related issues that may affect back pain. In essence, cognitive behavioural approaches aim to improve the way that an individual manages and copes with chronic pain, rather than finding a biological solution to the putative pathology. The approach is very much related to problem solving and returning control to the person with chronic pain. Many patients state that the pain rules their lives and cannot see how this can change without a medical cure. However, with appropriate instruction in a range of pacing techniques, cognitive therapy to help identify negative thinking patterns and the development of effective challenges, stretching and exercising to improve physical function, careful planning of tasks and daily activities and the judicious use of relaxation training, many people find the treatment enables them to take back control of their lives, to do more and feel better.
Assessing Your Lifestyle
The toolkit will teach you how assess your pain and activity levels, social support, sleep quality and diet. With helpful questionnaires to guide you, the toolkit will help you figure out your goals and how to achieve them.
Life Goals
Since pain can cause us to avoid activity, it is important to understand the barriers that prevent us from living fuller lives. Using a complete-this sentence technique, the toolkit will help you better understand what you want to do in life, who you want to do it with and under what circumstances.
Measuring Pain
To better understand your pain, it is important to measure pain over several days with several different types of measures. With the help of a pain log, you can chart your physical and emotional pain over the course of a couple of weeks. When you see the results you will have a better grasp of your pain levels. From there, you can decide on a course of action that works for you using the links the toolkit provides.
Measuring Sleep Quality
Sleep is crucial to living a healthy lifestyle, yet many of us do not get the quality and quantity of sleep we need. Insufficient or poor quality sleep happens for a number of reasons – stress, pain and poor sleep environment among others. By answering the questionnaire provided by the toolkit, you can assess your sleep quality an develop a sleep strategy that works for you.
Measuring Exercise
Exercise plays an important role in physical and mental health. Whether you are an active person or someone who identifies with the “couch potato” mentality, or someone in between, it can be helpful to spend some time thinking about your current activity level. This section of the toolkit will help you determine the types of activities you do, the activities you would like to do and when you want do them. From here, you can set up a calendar schedule to keep track of all your activities.
Measuring Social Support
Most of us need contact with other people. This section of the toolkit helps you identify people in your life from whom you can gain support. By making a list of the people who support you and they ways they support you, you can begin to think about ways to include them in your self-management process. If you live in an isolated community but have internet access, there are many online support groups available.
Measuring Coping Skills
Everyone has their own way of dealing with stressful situations. This section of the toolkit will help you understand how you cope [insert link to healthy thinking section] with painful events. There are many different ways people have learned to cope with life’s ups and downs. By listing your coping strategies, you begin to understand what works, what doesn't work for you and what coping skills you want to try.
This project has been partially funded by the Province of BC through the Direct Access/Community Gaming Grants.