A few months ago, during a stressful academic period, I developed moderate/severe finger pain when typing on my computer or phone. My front line treatment was to try to fix the physical problem. I spent hours researching the pain, getting medical scans, trying various medications/supplements, and even buying a $300 keyboard and learning a new keyboard layout for improved ergonomics. None of that worked. 

In addition to suffering physical pain, I began to suffer severe anxiety from the pain. I’m young and healthy and wasn’t willing to accept that I may have incurable physical pain. I felt hope when I realized that there was probably a psychosomatic aspect to my pain. I thought that if I could eliminate my anxiety, I’d overcome the pain. I adopted a pretty consistent meditation practice that initially helped reduce my anxiety, but the pain didn’t leave and my anxiety eventually worsened. As a last measure, I tried to combine CBT with meditation and expose myself to increased pain (safely), but that didn’t work either, and at this point I was feeling very lost and dark.

I then realized that maybe it would help if I let myself be negative about the pain. So I said to myself, “Yeah, this pain sucks and it might not go away. I genuinely might not be able to earn a living and I might have a disability forever.” Suddenly I felt better. I had done a sort of exposure and acceptance exercise on myself. 

I realized that I had been treating physical pain the same way you might treat an anxious thought — I was noticing it and not reacting to it. However, in doing so, I was failing to understand that pain requires a different treatment than thoughts, at least for me. I had to let myself drill down into the hole of negativity before I could excavate the gem of true acceptance. I used meditation and CBT as a frantically-built wall to hide the truth of physical pain — that I needed to react to it to accept it.