Mindfulness for Fibromyalgia

Mindfulness is gaining traction as a fibromyalgia treatment, but do you know what mindfulness really means? Have you wondered whether it's a passing fad or something that really works?

It's easy to see why people interested in fibromyalgia—whether they have it, treat it, research it, or know someone with it—turn to complementary and alternative approaches: this condition is tough to treat. The best medications only help about a third of the people who try them, and the side effect risk is high.

Meanwhile, we battle dozens of unpredictable symptoms that can derail our lives in a moment, or leave us house-bound much of the time.

So when headlines begin to sing the praises of something that helps fibromyalgia while being safe, simple, and relatively inexpensive, people take notice. Often when this happens, there's little research to back it up.

However, mindfulness practices have made some in-roads with researchers and we're accumulating more knowledge all the time. That means you can look at the evidence and decide for yourself whether to invest the time and energy into it.

What Is Mindfulness?

At its most basic, mindfulness can be described as being conscious or aware of something. When it's used to describe certain practices, however, it's about focusing your awareness on the present; observing in a detached manner without judgment and calmly acknowledging and accepting your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations.

Once you get the hang of it, you can practice mindfulness anywhere at any time, but certain activities that work well for helping you develop mindfulness include:

• Meditation
• Yoga
• Tai Chi
• Qigong

Since mindfulness started being explored to improve health, multiple medically focused programs have been developed, such as:

• Mindfulness-based stress reduction
• Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy
• Mindfulness-based childbirth and parenting

Fibromyalgia Mindfulness Research

Research on mindfulness for fibromyalgia is in the early stages. However, much of it is promising. Information presented at the Italian Consensus Conference on Pain in Neurorehabilitation gave a recommendation grade of A for mindfulness interventions for chronic pain overall, and a C for fibromyalgia specifically. The lower grade is likely due to smaller, lower-quality studies.

Studies on treatments like this tend to be plagued by problems with methodology, size, and bias. Numerous reviews of mindfulness research note these shortcomings as well as problems with inadequately described practices.

So while we don't have definitive answers from research, there's at least a place to start.

A 2017 study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology said mindfulness meditation led to significant and lasting improvements in participants with fibromyalgia, including:

• Symptomology
• Pain perception
• Sleep quality
• Psychological distress

Participants who spent more time meditating had better results.

 A 2015 study in Annals of Behavioral Medicine suggested that mindfulness-based stress reduction may reduce:

• Perceived stress
• Sleep disturbance
• Symptom severity

Researchers noted, as in the above study, that those who practiced more saw more improvement. However, this study found no changes with pain levels or physical function.

A Frontiers in Psychology study looked at mindfulness training in relation to anger, anxiety, and depression in people with fibromyalgia. Researchers said the training did significantly reduce all three along with increasing internal control of anger.

A 2016 pilot study focused on mindful yoga noted significant improvements in:

• Heat-pain tolerance
• Pressure-pain threshold
• Functional deficits
• Strength
• Balance
• Overall symptoms

Again, these studies should be viewed as preliminary—we still have much to learn.

Why Chose Mindfulness for Fibromyalgia?

When you have a condition like fibromyalgia, which can fluctuate wildly week to week, day to day, or even hour to hour, mindfulness may be extremely important. Many of us have early warning signs of a symptom increase in our bodies and minds. For one person, it may be pain in a particular spot. For another, it could be suddenly feeling distracted or mentally "out of it."

If you're aware enough of your body and what it's experiencing, you may be able to recognize these signs better and take appropriate action to head off a symptom spike or flare.

On top of that, we may have a tendency to focus on the negative. A 2014 study in Pain Medicine found evidence that people with fibromyalgia may have what's called an "attentional bias" toward negative information that appeared to be linked to pain severity. Researchers suggested that mindfulness training may help manage this trait and therefore reduce pain.

A Word From Verywell

If you think mindfulness could help you, the good news is that you don't have to wait for researchers to make up their minds about it. It's low-risk and something you can pursue either alone or through multiple types of training.