Dr. Aneesh Singla

even into the spinal nerves and can be quite excruciating.

And in those situations, I mentioned earlier, we talked about strong painkillers called opioids.

And in those cases, we will use opioids many times to try to control the pain amongst other therapies, like for example, injections or even maybe implantable devices to try to control pain.

So in those situations, as much as I would like to alleviate someone's pain and get their pain to a zero, it's also important for me and all pain specialists to set the expectations appropriately.

And in those situations, what we might do is shoot for a 50% reduction of pain, which is a more achievable goal.

It also helps the patient understand that, you know, they've got a problem that isn't going to be easy to manage, but we're certainly going to team up with them and try our best to manage their symptoms in a safe manner.

But also, you know, they're going to also have to be able to find other ways to cope with the pain that may not be pharmacologic.

Well, I would say that mindfulness has a huge role in helping to manage pain.

We've seen through studies that have been done post-operatively after surgery that incorporating mindfulness into their post-operative regimen actually helps to reduce opioid painkiller usage.

And so I think that what's happening is your mindfulness is affecting the cognitive and the emotional aspects of the pain.

You may be telling yourself a slightly different story about the pain than, you know, hey, I'm lying here in a hospital in terrible pain and I can't go outside and play basketball with my friends.

which might increase your pain level because you're suffering in different ways.

But if you tell yourself, hey, I'm going to get through this and I'm going to be better and eventually I am going to return to what I love doing, then you may interpret that pain a little bit differently.

So I think mindfulness has a pretty significant underutilized role in pain management and certainly can be very effective as part of a multimodal

You know, alongside medications, maybe physical therapy, etc.

All of those things can be very, very helpful.

Well, I've got a formula for this, and the formula is happiness equals reality minus expectations.

And what I'm trying to convey with that is that exactly like you said, Mike, if you set your expectations really, really high and reality sort of falls a little short of that, you're probably going to be unhappy.

But if your expectations are a bit lower than what your reality is, then you're going to be pretty happy.

And I think that does translate into how we interpret our pain, just like you said.