Find helpful resources for living with chronic pain, including books, blog posts, journal prompts, apps, podcasts, specific podcast episodes, and TED or TEDx Talks about chronic pain and mental health.
Table of Contents
Books
Blog Posts
- How to Get Family to Understand Chronic Pain?
- Top 9 Jobs for People with Chronic Pain
- How to Cope When Chronic Pain Makes You Feel Overwhelmed?
- How to Manage Stress When You Live With Chronic Pain?
- How to Challenge Negative Thoughts About Chronic Pain?
- How to Build a Daily Routine Around Unpredictable Pain?
- How to Handle Feeling Misunderstood Because of Chronic Pain?
- How to Set Boundaries When You Live With Chronic Pain?
- How to Cope With Grief Over the Life Chronic Pain Has Changed?
- How to Build a Meaningful Life While Living With Chronic Pain?
- 30 Chronic Pain Coping Skills That Actually Help
Chronic Pain Journal Prompts
- What does a typical lower-pain day look like for me?
- What does a typical high-pain day look like?
- What usually changes first when my pain begins to increase?
- Are there certain times of day when my pain tends to feel easier or harder?
- What activities seem to increase my pain most often?
Chronic Pain Apps
- Pain Coach — U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
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A free app specifically designed for people living with chronic pain. It includes pain and mood tracking, daily check-ins, coping exercises, education, journaling, and tools for identifying supportive people. It can be used alongside professional pain or mental-health treatment. - Curable
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A chronic-pain program combining pain education with psychological and behavioral exercises. It focuses on understanding persistent pain, examining the role of thoughts and emotions, changing pain-related habits, and gradually building confidence in everyday activities. A systematic review of pain-management apps rated Curable among the higher-quality apps for psychological pain-management content. - Pathways Pain Relief
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A chronic-pain app offering pain-science education, psychological exercises, pain tracking, confidence-building activities, stress-management tools, and gradual activity-based exercises.
Chronic Pain and Mental Health Podcasts
- Like Mind, Like Body
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A podcast from Curable exploring the psychological, social, and physical factors that can influence persistent pain. Guests include physicians, psychologists, therapists, researchers, and people living with chronic symptoms. Topics include fear, shame, stress, perfectionism, uncertainty, emotions, and changing the way someone responds to pain. - Unpacking Pain
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Hosted by a pain researcher and someone with long-term lived experience of chronic pain. The podcast examines pain through biological, psychological, and social factors and discusses stress, thoughts, sleep, relationships, healthcare experiences, uncertainty, and practical ways to live better with pain.
Specific Chronic Pain and Mental Health Podcast Episodes
- Understanding and Treating Chronic Pain — Speaking of Psychology
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Pain psychologist Dr. Rachel V. Aaron explains the connection between chronic pain and mental health, including anxiety, depression, emotions, life experiences, and pain-related thinking. She also discusses CBT and newer psychological approaches used alongside medical treatment. - Healing Pain by Treating the Mind — Speaking of Psychology
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Neuroscientist Dr. Tor Wager discusses how thoughts, expectations, emotions, and beliefs can influence the brain’s processing of pain. The episode explains why psychological factors can affect real physical pain without suggesting that the pain is imagined. - Explaining Pain as a Pain Psychologist — Pain Reframed
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Pain psychologist Dr. Rachel Zoffness explains the biopsychosocial model of pain and why understanding pain itself can be an important part of treatment. The episode discusses how physical health, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and social experiences interact. - Pain Catastrophizing — Pain Reframed
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Pain psychologist Dr. Beth Darnall discusses catastrophic pain thoughts such as assuming the pain will continually worsen or believing that life cannot improve while pain is present. The episode explores ways psychological treatment can challenge these patterns. - Using Psychology for Pain Relief and Opioid Reduction — Speaking of Psychology
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Dr. Beth Darnall discusses psychological approaches to chronic-pain management and how behavioral treatment can form one part of a broader pain-care plan. - Your Chronic Pain Questions — Unpacking Pain
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Addresses common questions such as why pain can remain when scans do not explain its severity, how stress and context can influence flare-ups, and how tracking thoughts, situations, people, and activities can help identify patterns.
TED & TEDx Talks About Chronic Pain and Mental Health
- The Mystery of Chronic Pain — Elliot Krane
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Pediatric pain specialist Elliot Krane explains how pain can sometimes continue after the original injury has healed and how changes in pain processing can cause the body’s alarm system to keep producing pain. - Understanding Pain and What to Do About It — Kory Zimney
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Pain researcher Kory Zimney explains persistent pain using modern pain science and discusses why pain intensity does not always directly reflect tissue damage. The talk focuses on understanding pain differently and rebuilding activity and confidence. - How Does Your Brain Respond to Pain? — Karen D. Davis
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Explains how the brain processes pain and why two people can experience the same painful stimulus differently. It is useful for understanding why context and individual differences matter in the experience of pain. - The Mysterious Science of Pain — Joshua Pate
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Uses examples from pain science to explain why pain is more complicated than a simple measure of physical damage and why the brain’s interpretation of threat plays an important role in what someone experiences. - How to Hack Your Brain When You’re in Pain — Amy Baxter
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Physician and pain researcher Amy Baxter explains how pain signals are processed and discusses practical ways sensory input can influence pain perception. - Chronic Pain: From Survival to Support — Kat Naud
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Kat Naud shares her experience of living with chronic pain and discusses the emotional and practical effects of trying to maintain relationships, activities, identity, and quality of life while pain is present.
