To be aware, or to accept, that is the question: Differential roles of awareness of automaticity and pain acceptance in opioid misuse

Emotion Regulation in Pain : Developing Effective Interventions for Patients with Pain and Emotional Distress

“…For instance, even though we did not find that attentional focus had an impact on coping with experimentally induced pain, there are other factors to consider when deciding what interventions to use in treatments. These factors include the necessity to increase awareness of problematic implicit strategies, behavioral patterns, and interoceptive experiences (Parisi et al, 2023), as well as indications for reducing problematic attentional biases (Broadbent et al, 2022) or a maladaptive self-focus (Watkins & Teasdale, 2004). While our preliminary findings need further validation among chronic pain patients in clinical settings, the indication that mindfulness exercises with both internal and external attentional focus can have positive acute effects on pain tolerance, threshold, and unpleasantness in experimentally induced pain presents some insights.…”