Our office will be closed on Monday, January 19, 2026, in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
We will resume normal operating hours on Tuesday, January 20, 2026.

Rivia Mind - Mental Healthcare You Can Trust
Click to Call
Refer a Patient

Can Psychotherapy Help With Chronic Pain?

We discuss how chronic pain and mental health intersect, and how psychotherapy can help both.

On this wellness blog, we often discuss the intersection between physical wellness and mental wellness. For instance, if you struggle with chronic physical pain, your mental health will likely suffer. But what about the reverse? If you treat your mental health by going to therapy, does that have a positive impact on your chronic pain? 

While the best treatment for chronic pain is whatever your general practitioner or pain specialist prescribes, studies have shown that psychotherapy does in fact reduce symptoms of chronic pain.1 In this blog, we’ll discuss how chronic pain and mental health intersect, and how psychotherapy can help both.

How Chronic Pain and Mental Health Intersect

Well over one third of people who suffer from chronic pain also experience depression.2 Anxiety and substance abuse are also common comorbidities with chronic pain conditions. The reason is that being in constant or frequent pain is about more than simply the physical. It can leave you with little energy or focus, can interrupt your sleep, and raise your stress levels.

Chronic Pain Exacerbating Mental Health

Imagine the stress of having a bad day. You get stuck in traffic and reprimanded at work for being late. You leave your lunch at home. It rains on your way to the grocery store. This can all be stressful to begin with. But with chronic pain, those stressors become further magnified because you’re already under the stress of trying to function while in pain.

Some individuals who suffer with chronic pain become more isolated or reclusive in an attempt not to exacerbate their pain or become a “burden” on those around them. This isolation can lead to feelings of loneliness and depression. Others might turn to substance abuse as a way of numbing their pain so that they can go about their day.

Link Between Chronic Pain and Mental Illness

But the connection goes deeper than that. Some studies have found that chronic pain and mental health disorders share neural mechanisms,3 so the ways in which they impact each other is biological. People with depression are often found to be more sensitive to pain, for instance. And since chronic pain can exacerbate depression, it can become a vicious cycle. The good news is that treatment that helps one can often help the other.

How Psychotherapy Helps With Chronic Pain

In most cases, chronic pain will merit physical therapy, perhaps surgery or pain medication. However, psychotherapy has also been found to be helpful in easing chronic pain for those who live with it. These are some of the ways psychotherapy can help:

More Effectively Coping With Pain

One way that psychotherapy can help with chronic pain is by helping you regulate your emotional symptoms so you can better cope with physical pain. For instance, your diet and exercise can often affect your chronic pain symptoms. If you have depression, you might be more tempted to binge eat or to be vegetative during depressive episodes. If you develop a plan to avoid your target behaviors during a depressive episode, you will take better care of yourself and your pain will be more manageable.

Increasing Physical Functioning

Therapy helps patients with mental illness to better manage their symptoms so they can go about their daily life. By the same token, your therapist may be able to help you boost physical functioning throughout your day by working through your chronic pain symptoms and the emotional impact of your chronic pain. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is often utilized for chronic pain sufferers. CBT works by reframing the patient’s thoughts to reframe their behaviors. In doing so, you actually build new neural pathways and become more resilient. This won’t cause your chronic pain to disappear, but it can make you less sensitive to pain and more adaptable when you experience pain.

Improving Your Mood

By learning to cope and be more elastic with your mental health symptoms, you will likely see an improvement in your mood — or at least a more frequent stable mood. And this could have an impact on your pain. A 2008 study linked depressed moods to higher pain rating and lower pain tolerance, while happy moods showed lower pain and greater pain tolerance.4 You may not always be able to be in a good mood, and you may not always be able to not be in pain. But with therapy, you may be able to learn to stabilize both.

Psychotherapy should never be the primary treatment for chronic pain. However, research has shown time and time again that it can have a positive influence on pain responses and pain management. Even more importantly, therapy can help you cope with the emotional side effects of chronic pain.

Rivia Mind is here with a staff of skilled and compassionate clinicians to help you if you suffer from chronic pain. Contact us today to learn more or to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

Resources:

  1. Managing chronic pain: How psychologists can help with pain management – American Psychological Association
  2. Chronic Pain and Mental Health Often Interconnected – American Psychiatric Association
  3. Chronic Pain and Mental Health Disorders: Shared Neural Mechanisms, Epidemiology, and Treatment – Hooten, Michael W, 2016
  4. Effects of mood on pain responses and pain tolerance: an experimental study in chronic back pain patients – Tang, Nicole K Y; Salkovskis, Paul M; Wright, Kelly J; Hanna, Magdi; Hester, Joan; 2008
Categories
Recent Posts
Tags