My top book recommendations for Chronic Pain

If you are like me, I love a good book.

I even love a book shop, I love the smell of them and I like looking at them on my shelf! I do like and appreciate my kindle paperwhite but there is something so lovely about an actual book.

But apart from their smell and appearance, books are so informative. I have done a lot of reading over the past 20 years on mental health, psychology and chronic pain. There are so many books out there and sometimes when your living with a condition like chronic pain or experiencing mental health difficulties like depression or anxiety it is hard to know where to turn.

Here are my top book recommendations for understanding and learning about chronic pain (not in any particular order):

1: Overcoming Chronic Pain by Frances Cole

This book is really helpful and informative based on highly effective methods developed by specialists in pain management. This book is a self help guide using Cognitive Behavioural Techniques. Although it is self help book aimed for people with chronic pain, it’s a really informative book for those who want to learn more about pain and know how they can support or help someone with pain. This is a fairly easy read although does start to challenge and look at changing unhelpful behaviours or thoughts. It helps readers have a more positive attitude towards illness and pain.

2: The Body keeps there score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

This book is a really interesting, captivating read. It explains and looks at how the effects of trauma can impact the body. This book looks at how we can move away from usual medication therapy towards an alternative therapy looking at healing the mind, brain and body.

This book is really well written and laid out, really informative on how the problem may be presenting and then looking at how to make some improvements. It is a very thought provoking, detailed and wonderfully written book, would highly recommend.

3: Outsmart your Pain by Christian Wolf

This book is a brilliant book focussing on mindfulness and compassion. It offers a lot of tools to help you live happier and healthier with your pain or illness. There is evidence based guides to helping live with pain using mindfulness and self compassion practices.

This book may just help you change your approach and perception of pain, re-framing how you think about your pain which can reduce the impact. There are many tips and strategies in this book to try.

4: Heal Chronic Pain: The way out by Alan Gordon

The author, Alan Gordon is a chronic pain sufferer himself and was frustrated at the lack of treatment available. This book provides and easy to follow guide to ending your pain. Focusses on education, learning to turn off the pain signals and using techniques to break the cycle of fear around pain. It’s simple to read and understand and easy to put into practice techniques.

5: Explain Pain by Lorrimer Moseley

This book, whilst on the expensive side for a book is it one of the best books out there for understanding chronic pain for both clinicians and for people with chronic pain. This book aims to demystify the process of understanding and managing pain. This book goes into detail about pain responses are produced in the brain, how pain persists when when injury is no longer available. There is scientific evidence and research throughout the book then ways you can change your mindset on pain.

If you want an introduction to what is chronic pain you can head to my post ‘What is Chronic Pain’ here on substack: What is Chronic Pain post

Hope you found this helpful, let me know if you have any other recommendations! I am always eager to add to my collection!!

Happy Reading!