Mind your Pain

Mind your Pain (MyP) is based on a Mindfulness-based Interoceptive Exposure Task (MIET) and is an innovative brief mindfulness-based intervention developed within the frame of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and pilot tested in Australia in a small cohort of patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain. It consists of an individual guided 1-hour introduction session, repeated as needed, and a 1-minute attention task subsequently performed several times per day over 8 or 12 weeks. The task is to focus on the most intense pain sensation in a detached and equanimeous way and carefully observe potential changes in five characteristic aspects of that sensation: feeling tone (sharp or dull); motion (moving vs. still); temperature (cold/ warm/ hot); density (loose vs. constricted); clarity (clear or diffuse borders). This ‘objective’ sensory-descriptive interoceptive attention focus is aiming at preventing the learned aversive response to pain that entails ruminating thoughts, and negative affect rather than immediate sensory awareness. We will offer the MyP training as a phone app to patients with chronic low back pain, validate it on self-report outcomes (pain impact) and objectively (QST and fMRI Anticipation/Attention task) with 30 participants over 8 weeks.