Pain management
Pain affects many of us throughout our lives. The Health Survey for England found that more than 1 in 4 adults experience chronic pain, with more than 1 in 10 experiencing pain that substantially interferes with everyday life¹. And there are many ways pain can interfere with our lives beyond discomfort and physical distress alone:
– Perhaps you have started planning your week around how much pain you expect to be in?
– Maybe you worry about being able to manage work tomorrow with your pain?
– Or there is an appointment coming up and you are dreading it more than you would like to admit?
– Maybe you have started noticing yourself regularly scanning your body for signs of a flare-up?
– Perhaps sleeping well has become difficult? Or the exercise or activities you used to enjoy now feel risky or dangerous?
Pain is real, whatever is causing it.
It is also more than a sensation. Alongside what you feel, there is the emotional experience and reaction to it, the thoughts that come with it, where your attention goes, and what you stop doing because of it. Those parts influence one another. It is why the same injury can feel manageable on one day and unbearable on another. The experience of pain can change and be changed, even when the physical condition has itself not obviously changed.
Pain is an experience produced by our protective nervous system, rather than always being a direct measure of tissue damage. The brain and nervous system continually interpret signals from the body, meaning that factors such as attention, fear, previous experience, expectations, sleep and stress can sometimes increase or decrease the pain we experience. None of that means pain is imagined, or that it is “all in the mind”. Rather it helps explain why psychological and behavioural approaches can influence a genuinely physical experience.
Hypno-CBT® can help people with persistent pain by reducing pain-related fear and distress, changing unhelpful patterns of attention, thinking and avoidance, and building skills that can lessen pain’s intensity, impact, and disruption while helping people return to important life activities.
Please speak to your doctor first
Pain needs to be assessed medically. If your pain is new, changing, or has not been looked into, please see your GP before booking therapy: a therapist listed here will ask you to do this anyway, because it is part of how they are trained to work.
Hypno-CBT® is not a medical treatment and Hypno-CBT® therapists will not diagnose or address any underlying physical cause of pain. Therapists listed here work alongside your GP, consultant or pain service, not instead of them. Please do not change or stop any prescribed medication without speaking to whoever prescribed it.
¹ NHS England (2026) Health Survey for England 2024: Chronic pain. Leeds: NHS England. Published 27 January 2026.
Pain can take many forms. You might recognise some of these:
Arthritic pain
is the joint pain, swelling and stiffness that comes with arthritic conditions, and often varies in intensity from one day to the next.
Back pain
is pain anywhere along the spine, from the neck to the lower back. Often, no single identifiable structural problem fully explains a person’s pain or how severe it feels. It is one of the most common reasons people in the UK look for help with pain.
Chronic pain
is pain that continues for longer than three months, or beyond the point at which an injury would normally be expected to have healed.
Discomfort during medical and dental treatment
covers the pain, discomfort and apprehension that can come with injections, scans, dental work and other procedures.
Fear of dental treatment
is anxiety or dread about dental appointments, often tied to a fear of pain or of losing control, which can lead people to put off the care they need.
Flare-ups
are periods when pain becomes noticeably worse for a time. They can be unpredictable, and are often followed by a drop in confidence and activity.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
is a common, long-term condition involving abdominal pain or cramping, bloating and changes in bowel habit.
Jaw pain
includes temporomandibular disorder (or ‘TMD’) and is pain in the jaw joint and the muscles around it, often associated with clenching or teeth grinding, and may come with headaches and earache.
Neck ache
is pain and stiffness across the neck, shoulders and upper back, and may be influenced by movement, daily habits, muscle tension, stress, sleep and other factors.
Painful periods
are cramping pains in the lower abdomen before or during menstruation, which for some people are severe enough to disrupt daily life.
Pain during sex (dyspareunia)
is persistent or recurrent pain in the genital region or pelvis during sexual activity, affecting both men and women.
Pelvic pain
is persistent pain felt in the lower abdomen or pelvis, which can have several contributing causes.
Tension headache
is the most common form of headache, felt as a dull, pressing pain or a band of tightness across the forehead, temples or back of the head.
The impact of living with pain covers the knock-on effects that often matter as much as the pain itself: broken sleep, low mood, frustration, dread about the future, and a shrinking world as activities get dropped one by one.
Living with pain is tiring in a way that is hard to explain to people who have not done it, and it often narrows life further than the pain itself does.
What a Hypno-CBT® therapist would actually do
Hypno-CBT® combines the practical, structured tools of CBT with the focused attention of modern hypnosis. Applied to pain, that usually means a combined approach including:
- Explaining how pain works, recognising signals and understanding your response to them.
- Working with the fear or the alarm that can accompany pain as well as the pain experience itself. Reducing unnecessary threat and fear can help reduce the impact pain has on you.
- Hypno-CBT® helps you learn to direct your attention more flexibly, so that pain does not automatically dominate your awareness, and helps reconnect your attention with other experiences and important areas of life.
- Hypno-CBT® uses helpful, supportive imagery and hypnosis to influence your pain experience and mentally rehearse more confident and helpful ways of coping, moving and living.
Hypno-CBT® is not a quick fix for pain, and no therapist listed here should describe it as one. What this approach does aim to do is help you experience less alarm, more control, better sleep, and enough easing that life opens up again. For many people that is the change that matters most.
If you’ve experienced any of these issues and would like support, [Find a therapist] to see practitioners who can help.