I do use positive thoughts and guided meditations as a way of trying to escape chronic pain if I cant get to sleep. It can work sometimes for a short while so you can get to sleep but it can take some time to master. Take your time to focus on just you and the words that are said and the music or noises being played. Being able to ease the pain for even short periods of time can be a welcome break.

I was hoping to learn something new in this book because as a chronic pain sufferer I look for anything that can help my situation. I find it very difficult to “accept my pain”. I understand the concept but when your body is constantly hurting and preventing you from doing the things you want to do, its hard to ignore it. Your mind automatically goes to that area needing relief.

I do appreciate her kindness and understanding as it is not something shown to many sufferers. I hope another sufferer can use the power of their mind better than myself!

Tired of being in pain all the time? This book is essential reading for those looking to move beyond pain we all experience, towards a path of healing and wellness.

Informative, realistic, compassionate - such a refreshing book in the "overcome your chronic pain" catalog. I really liked the way Wolf explained things and laid out these mindfulness exercises, and I plan to try many of them.

I liked Dr. Christiane Wolf’s compassionate approach to working with the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of pain. Her approach includes techniques from mindfulness meditation, neuroscience, and psychotherapy. The book consists of 20 short, easy to understand chapters, each of which explains one concept, provides a patient’s story with pain, and offers a relevant guided meditation. Many chapters also include questions for reflection. The practices in this book might not eliminate your pain, but they will improve your quality of life.

I appreciated the author’s explanations of concepts such as compassion versus empathy versus pity or acceptance and surrender versus defeat. I found her suggestions for handling big emotions such as depression, grief, and anger very helpful. She provides wonderful suggestions for avoiding comparing yourself to others, dealing with other people’s ignorance of chronic pain, and learning to accept and be present with your pain without letting it take over your life.

The author provides downloadable MP3s of herself reading the meditations on her website, which is a very helpful resource. Additional resources, such as recommended reading and meditation apps, are listed in a Resources section at the back of the book.

I recommend this for anyone dealing with chronic pain or illness.

Thanks to The Experiment for providing me with an unproofed ARC through NetGalley that I volunteered to review.

“Outsmart Your Pain” invites people with chronic pain on a journey to reinterpret their experience of pain through Dr. Christiane Wolf’s informed medical background, and more recently, her years of Insight Meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MSBR), teacher training and facilitation.
Each chapter provides a short vignette: a practitioner or client with chronic pain, and how Wolf suggests a way to reexamine their experience through a different lens. This lens may be via tenets of meditation including remaining in the present moment or forgiveness. Additionally, chapters encompass related brief instructions on forgiveness (or related chapter theme) and a correlating meditation.
If readers are aiming to utilize the meditation at the end of each chapter, they might be best served with the audio version.

A great guide for mindfulness and controlling pain by focusing on other things. The exercises are a great way to center yourself and to relax.

Worth a try.

This book does a good job of explaining how to utilize mindfulness and meditation to assist with managing pain. Is this book going to 'solve' pain, no-- but it could be a good tool to have in the toolbox.

This has so much potential as a tool for wellness. As a chronic pain sufferer, this is not my first foray into "mind over medicine" wellness healthcare. I am a firm advocate that it has a place in everyone's toolbox, and not just sick people, or chronic pain sufferers. My issue with this particular book (that I REALLY wanted to love) is that while it spends *almost* enough time getting into the actual substance, the how-to of feeling better and using it as a tool - it spends entirely too much time giving case-study instances and "I did this" and "this was the author's experience" and "this is what I had for breakfast this morning"... Not quite that bad, but you get the idea. Like I find with most non-fiction books, it spends too much time getting stuck in the weeds and not giving a user-friendly, easy to break down, every day guide to actually being able to incorporate these techniques into an effective, long term self care routine. Because let's face it. When you are in pain, and can't sleep, and are irritable, and can't focus, and hear about this FANTASTIC new way to help cope with pain, the last thing you want is to read about the author moving to Los Angeles. It could have probably been half of the size and more effective.

This was a great read for someone with chronic pain that cannot be resolved....in other words my husband! I enjoyed all the examples and advice on what to do to ease chronic pain. Thanks!

This book offered a host of good information and ideas for dealing with chronic pain. I found useful information that I am trying to build in to my own experience with sciatica. Thank you

This book is a wonderful guide to making life with chronic pain more bearable. The author, who teaches mindfulness to chronic pain sufferers for more than 15 years, provides guided meditation exercises to help shifting focus from the pain to different sensations and feelings. For me the most helpful insight was to learn to separate the physical from psychological pain and not be defined by the pain. The book appears to be well researched and the writing is engaging. The electronic advanced copy made it difficult to follow the guided meditation exercises (it looks like the print copy will have links to audio), even so the book provides helpful insights.

This book was received as an ARC from The Experiment in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

I learned so much from this book. I always knew pain was just as much psychological than it is physical and once the psychological is mastered, the physical doesn't seem so bad. We always see pain as negative and whenever we feel it in its many forms, we always think negative. Christiane Wolf demonstrates how to relax with insightful meditations that I was fortunate enough to try while reading while feeling a little stress and getting a sudden headache and once I finished, I was relaxed and my headache started to subside. I know this book will circulate well and we will have many who will benefit from this book.

We will consider adding this title to our R Non-Fiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

Between chronic pain I’m still getting used to and a budding mindfulness practice, this is exactly the book I needed right now.

Dr. Wolf has been teaching mindfulness classes to people who suffer from chronic pain since 2005 and in Outsmart Your Pain: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind she shares many guided meditations and insights into how mindfulness can help people cope with and even reduce their pain.

She discusses how mindfulness can be used for everything from restructuring relationships with pain to managing relationships with others when pain complicates them. There is so much good information in this book and Wolf makes her points thoroughly, eloquently, and with real word and scientifically based examples. A few of my favorite take-aways were:

that people tend to unconsciously define themselves by their pain and redefining that relationship can ease a lot of emotional burden

we also tend to lump physical pain, the emotional pain it causes, and thoughts about it into one big box labeled “pain,” making it bigger and harder to deal with than it needs to be

and that mindfulness can help people suffering from chronic pain by teaching how to to better direct attention and chose what thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are in the spotlight


The biggest downside of this book is that the texts of the guided meditations are hard to use. When the book is officially published it appears that there will be a link to the audio of all the meditations, if this tool were included and easy to access and navigate I’d give this book a full five stars so I’ve rounded up this review. As it was, in the text-only version I had, I would still rate it with four stars.