This week, I read “The Way Out: A Revolutionary,Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain” by Alan Gordon. It was all about neuroplastic pain, the kind you accidentally train your brain into generating by anticipating pain, associating it with certain circumstances, or feeling anxious about experiencing it. Not all chronic pain is neuroplastic pain, of course, but I imagine that even structurally caused pain can have neuroplastic elements. My rheumatologist once told me, years ago, that he had seen wide discrepancies in the pain experience of his patients with arthritis. Some people whose joints showed tons of degeneration on X-rays were in very little pain. Some people with barely any structural changes were in a lot.

So guess what personality traits are common in people who tend to experience neuroplastic pain? Perfectionism. Conscientiousness. People-pleasing. Anxiety. Oof, if each of them was worth 25 points for having the maximum amount, I’d score something like 70-80 on that quiz. And it wasn’t really something I wanted to win at! But if my brain is so powerful I can think myself into a problem, it seems likely that I can train my brain back out of it again.

So I plan to try the techniques outlined in the book, which go by Pain Reprocessing Therapy. Not only do they draw on the small skill I’ve already built with mindfulness after all my years of meditating, but the technique suggests a helpful path for self-treating my anxiety—one that I’ve been looking for (from my therapist, in books about Buddhist psychology and practice) for quite some time. Other sources have contrasted anxiety with equanimity, calm, or relaxation. But equanimity is something of a neutral state, and I have struggled to use it as much of a counterbalance to worrying thoughts. I want to get to that neutral state, yes! But just knowing that it’s a possibility or having a habit of getting there daily (with my 20 minute meditation) isn’t enough to dispute anxious feelings for me. Alan Gordon suggests that the anodyne to anxiety is cultivating feelings of safety—and that really resonates.

I doubt that a few months of working on my mindset is going to suddenly cure all my problems. But as with every other aspect of my pain management and activity-budgeting, every little bit helps! The less I have to rely on analgesics and the more activities I can manage, the better.