Outsmart Your Pain

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.