Wayne Martin, LCSW, BCIAC
Baylor All Saints Hospital
1400 Eighth Ave., Suite C6
Fort Worth, TX 76104
817-922-2060
Transcript: What role does stress play in pain?
What role does stress play in pain? Stress is a critical player in a person’s experience of pain. If you are highly stressed, studies are clear you will experience more pain. If you can limit or lower the stress that you’re experiencing, you will experience less pain and that is even true of the jolts of pain that seem to come out of no where for the person who has trigeminal neuralgia.
So then the question gets to be what do I do to limit the effects of stress on my pain experience? And the answer is you begin to manage your stress better and along the way you’re also learning to manage your pain better because there’s a great deal of overlap between stress management principles and pain management principles. So the trick is to learn how to do some of both and become more competent at coping with and managing your own pain yourself.