Benefits of Mindfulness Meditations for Managing Endometriosis Pain

When living with endometriosis, daily life can be incredibly challenging. This in turn can actively limit our capacity to adopt good, healthy habits to manage it.

This is due in large part to our energy resources. When we’re fatigued or in pain, we’re less likely to find the motivation to take on the more preventative measures, like eating well, meditating, or doing gentle movement and exercise.

It’s also easy to fall into shame cycles when we have a pain flare-up — often blaming something we did for causing it. But it’s not your fault whatsoever.

It’s unrealistic to be flawless with our habits all of the time, and we shouldn’t be punished with pain just because we’re not doing everything perfectly. Our rest and comfort can sometimes thrive on indulgences, like junk food. They are the fun parts of life, and we shouldn’t suffer for them.

Dieticians often teach the idea of ‘crowding’, which involves adding healthy foods to your diet while still enjoying foods of lower nutritional value. This concept is built on the human notion that habits are both hard to break and create — so how can we find ways to introduce small, beneficial habits (or, in this case, foods) without overwhelming ourselves?

Mindfulness meditations are like 'crowding' for your life. They are a simple introduction to your daily routine — and require very little effort, even when you're unwell. All you have to do is listen and relax.

Most importantly, they help the body find safety and are one of the most simple, easy, and effective ways to reduce the stress, anxiety, and pain from endometriosis.

The Pain Brain

Stress and anxiety lead to inflammation, which signals your brain to protect you with pain.

The brain…well… it a bit dumb. It trying to help, but it…it kinda dumb sometimes. The brain actually thinks it’s helping you — keeping you safe. There are so many brilliant parts of your beautiful brain, but there are some weird things happening there between the brain and spinal cord that defy most logic.

It’s like one of those people who is trying to be supportive by helping you move house but is making things worse. We all know them. Think of your brain as David, the guy from work who had a truck, but it turns out he’s dinging up your stainless-steel fridge without any acknowledgement for how you feel — he just wanted the free beers you promised. Thanks, David.

David, I mean your brain, is just doing its best with the coping mechanisms it knows to use. Pain is an evolutionary tool for survival. Quite simply, the brain sends pain signals to alert the body to danger. Unfortunately, the brain can get confused as to what constitutes 'danger'.

If you put your hand on a hot stove but didn't feel pain, you would burn your hand quite badly. This is where the pain brain is quite helpful.

When dealing with chronic pain, however, the brain learns to safeguard against danger wherever and whenever possible — always on the lookout for it. As a result, it actively treats your pelvis as the hand on the stove.

When living with the chronic pain from endometriosis, even something as simple as a brief cramp from running can have the volume disproportionately turned up.

Training the Brain

Mindfulness practice is just that: a practice. We’re training the brain not to react with that pain mechanism — and better yet, to not always be a detective for pain, searching for it when it’s not even readily present (e.g., after all of the damaged tissue is removed from surgery).

We’re also training it to feel okay with being calm. Endo warriors deal with more stress and anxiety than most people. Over time, your body is being primed to stay in a reactive state. This is what it knows and where it feels safest, even if it’s an awful physiological state for you.

We need the body to get comfortable with being comfortable. There are so many primitive processes operating 24/7 in the brain, mainly from when you needed to be alert to the potential sabre-tooth tiger in the bushes. Now, it’s just trying to be alert to pain, hoping to protect. Again, it dumb.

Another important change we're creating through mindfulness is turning down the volume on the brain's pain signals, even if we can't eliminate them entirely. This is particularly important if you've been suffering with chronic pain for a long time. The brain will naturally become more aggressive in its effort to protect, responding by turning up the volume on the pain.

Introducing Small, Beneficial Habits

As mentioned earlier, habits are hard to both break and create. A good place to start is with your attitude or thoughts towards meditation and how beneficial it can be. It’s natural to be sceptical about its effectiveness for pain and anxiety if you've never done it before — and your brain is very aware of this.

However, meditations are incredibly helpful at creating new neurological connections in the brain for calmness and relaxation, allowing it to become less reactive with pain over time. There’s many clinical research studies and solid evidence bases to back this.

And while it's best to manage expectations, the beneficial impacts of manipulating your brain not to be overreactive to pain are substantial.

Recognising the benefits of mindfulness meditation is already priming your brain to see it as a safe maneuver. It's a key component of the behavioural change you want to undertake.

Checking in with the body through mindfulness practices is your new way of telling the brain it’s safe. I’ve got it from here, David. In fact, this is a crucial step. The brain may actively work against you the first several times you do this because calmness and relaxation may be unfamiliar, almost scary.

Therefore, it’s important to power through the mental resistance. Even simple affirmations, such as ‘I am safe’, can be useful if you’re encountering this. Deep breathing is also important to incorporate.

The next step is changing your behaviour — even just scheduling in 3, 5, or 10 minutes a day makes a massive difference. Or just start small — try it a couple days a week (I really need a listener boost).

Either way, your body and mind will thank you over time.

Let’s do this, friends. You can start by listening here.