What is persistent pain?

Pain is what we feel when we injure ourselves and we expect it to resolve when our tissues recover. Pain can be helpful as it is our brains way of protecting us from doing further damage like preventing us from continuing to run on a sprained ankle. However, persistent pain (sometimes called Chronic pain) is pain that lasts longer than natural healing times. In other words, it is when we are experiencing pain but there is no actual tissue damage occurring. This type of pain occurs when our brain is being overprotective and is not very helpful. We may feel unable to move and get back to exercise although our bodies are perfectly safe to do so. This type of pain may occur when our nervous system gets confused and perceives what are usually non-painful signals as painful ones. For example, heightened stress can amplify the body’s sensitivity to pain signals. This can be difficult to understand and often requires help to do so. This type of pain is often driven and/or heightened by several other factors including our sleep, stress levels and mental well-being.

And what is Yoga?

It may not come as a surprise to you but yoga is not just about getting super flexible and standing on your head (although you can do that too if you like!). Yoga is a unique form of physical activity, which combines physical movement with mindfulness and breathing exercises. You may have heard that yoga ‘connects the mind with the body!’ (Sounds a bit odd doesn’t it? Your mind is part of your body). But it is true, yoga helps people feel a better sense of body awareness, hence ‘mind-body connection’. Yoga’s unique postures combined with deep breathing exercises have been shown to have a number of both physiological a psychological health benefits including helping regulate the nervous system, reduce stress and improve mental wellbeing.

So how could Yoga help with persistent pain?

As already mentioned, there are several factors that can help increase and/or drive persistent pain, these include poor sleep, stress, anxiety, low mood and fear of movement. Yoga may be helpful in improving these psychological factors and has been shown to help in the treatment of persistent pain. In fact the American College of Physicians now recommends yoga for chronic low back pain as a first line therapy! Furthermore, there is more and more research demonstrating the positive impact yoga has to improve pain, quality of life, and function for patients with several health conditions including fibromyalgia (Macfariane et al. 2017), lower back pain (Anheyer et al. 2022), headaches (Carnero et al. 2023; La Touche et al. 2023), neck pain (Gao et al. 2024) and pain associated with arthritis (Lu et al. 2024).

Interested in giving Yoga a go?

PhysioSpace provides both small group classes, where you can expect plenty of individual attention and support, and 1:1 classes where sessions can be specifically tailored to support your needs.

By Rhiannon Walters