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Activities of daily living (ADLs) are the basic actions involved in caring for yourself and your body. They include personal care, mobility, and eating. Unfortunately, chronic pain can make some of these tasks difficult, or even impossible, to complete without assistance. People with pain of all ages can experience these difficulties. If you are concerned about your ability to take part in activities of daily living, you can ask your health care provider to complete an assessment and provide guidance on how you might be able to get help, such as home support services.

It takes strength, patience, and energy to support a person living with pain. It feels hard because it is hard. Your relationship may feel tense, you may not know what they expect, and you may feel overwhelmed. You may feel frustrated with a lack of formal and informal support and may fear it’s more than you can handle. However, you are not alone. These support tools and strategies may help you.

Chronic pain can be overwhelming. Caring for someone else while you are in pain adds an extra layer of complexity. Managing care duties while living with pain can be difficult for several reasons including fatigue, managing multiple medical appointments, physical limitations, and stress. Caregivers living with invisible pain may also find it challenging to manage expectations that their loved ones may have of them.

Indigenous populations experience chronic pain at disproportionate rates in comparison to their non-Indigenous counterparts. However, Indigenous populations are often less likely to obtain and receive care and support for their experiences of pain. This fact sheet includes resources for Indigenous peoples living with pain related to health care, mental health, housing, and more.

When living with a chronic illness, you may have less capacity for stress and your emotions may rise to the surface quickly. It can be particularly stressful when your family and friends have expectations that are not in line with your abilities, energy levels and/or tolerance. The following strategies can help you navigate the relationships in your life.

Living with chronic pain can often involve meeting with a number of health care providers. It can be useful to know how to communicate effectively with health care providers to ensure you’re getting the best care possible. Here are some strategies that can help.

Complementary therapies can help with managing pain. These therapies often work by changing how you pay attention to your pain, releasing muscle tension caused by pain and encouraging overall relaxation.

Experiences of anxiety and/or depression can cause increased intensity of pain, and flare-ups of pain often impact well-being. As well, people living with pain often deal with profound loss and unwanted changes in their lives and may experience these effects in a variety of ways including grief, anger and isolation.

Using self-help materials, receiving support from friends and family, or joining a local support group can help you develop coping skills. However, sometimes we need extra help. Working with a counsellor may give you the additional guidance you need to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of living with pain.

Physiotherapists help people living with conditions such as chronic pain improve their quality of life, improve physical functioning and support their recovery. A physiotherapist is a health care professional who works from a patient-centered approach and uses knowledge of anatomy, kinesiology and physiology to assess, treat and manage pain, injuries, movement dysfunction and chronic conditions.

These resources may be helpful in finding a physiotherapist near you.

Occupational therapists (OTs) help people living with injury, illness or disability, such as chronic pain, improve, maintain, or restore their ability to perform everyday tasks, including self-care, leisure, education, home management, volunteering, work, and much more.

Flare-ups are periods of increased pain often experienced by people who live with ongoing chronic pain. Sometimes it’s hard to know what triggers a flare-up, especially because there are usually a number of factors involved. Flare-ups usually happen when either our pain increases or there are changes in how well we are dealing with pain.

Goal planning can help us stay accountable to ourselves in our pain management, and reflecting on our values can help us make these goals and motivate us when things are tough. Through intention setting, we can reflect on how our daily activities influence our goals. 

Grief is a natural response to loss and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Often the pain of loss can be as difficult as the chronic pain, and this can be overwhelming at times. Everyone reacts to grief and loss differently. The experience can involve difficult emotions and impact how you feel and interact with yourself and those around you.

Managing chronic pain is difficult at the best of times so during the holidays it is important to manage your expectations. What we have done in the past may change over time. If you spend a lot of time with family, friends, or other groups during the holidays, discuss your holiday priorities with them so they’re aware of your limitations and needs for help.

If chronic pain limits your ability to work, you may be eligible for provincial or federal income support. These sources of income support may help you.

Depending on the requirements of the job and the nature of one’s pain condition, individuals may experience increased pain, and its associated symptoms, due to their work. However, maintaining employment provides the financial means to access pain management resources. Work can also serve as a place to engage in valuable social interactions, increase self-esteem, and provide meaning to one’s life which can improve health outcomes. If you are one of the many people who are living with chronic pain and are employed, or if you are looking to re-enter the workforce, know that there are laws, resources, and support available to support you

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is a health care service that provides people who are experiencing intolerable suffering due to a grievous and incurable medical condition the option to end their life with the assistance of a doctor or nurse practitioner. This only occurs at the individual’s request. This fact sheet includes information about MAiD.

There is a lot of misinformation about prescription medication, so it’s not surprising half of all people with prescriptions in Canada don’t take them properly. This can lead to treatment failures. Our fact sheet covers the basics of medication and how to make the most of it.

Sometimes living with pain can be overwhelming. It’s not just the pain that hurts; your mind can start to suffer as you try to find a way to make the pain stop. Mindfulness has been often been defined as the awareness that comes from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.

Movement is one of the most common recommendations given for people living with pain, this is because movement is medicine. For many people living with pain, it can be incredibly challenging to start moving again. Fear of re-injury, pain levels, fatigue and motivation can all be roadblocks to moving again. However, just like finding the right medication, finding the right type and amount of movement that works for you can take time.

Creating healthy eating habits can be one tool in your toolbox for self-managing your pain. To date, there is no cure-all diet for pain, however healthy eating can benefit people with chronic pain in many ways. By taking an individualized approach to nutrition for pain management, you can positively impact the way you feel. Below are some practical tips for eating well when living with pain.

The standards for prescribing opioid medications in BC have changed over the past several years. This resource describes why prescribing practices have changed in BC, what Pain BC is doing about it, and what to do if your opioid medications are being decreased without your consent.

Pacing means to achieve and maintain a relatively even level of activity energy throughout the day, even though you may naturally want to try and keep up with your family and friends or community. Pacing is not all about stopping the activities you enjoy. With trial and error, pacing will allow you to find out how much activity your body can handle before pain begins to increase.

Sex and physical intimacy should be a source of joy and pleasure, but can become difficult or scary if one partner is worried they’ll hurt the other or cause a pain flare-up. This fact sheet shares some ways to support intimacy while living with pain.

As you know, chronic pain is much more than just an uncomfortable feeling. Living with pain affects our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, and how we relate to other people and the world around us.

Community resources are available to support you. Helping to manage your stress, mental health, physical health, sleep and practical needs can provide some relief when living with pain. The following free resources may provide you with some support as part of your pain journey.

Resilience is an important part of managing life with chronic pain. It is the process of adapting when faced with adversity, trauma, threats or significant sources of stress. It grows as we overcome difficult challenges and can actually leave us with more strength than we started with. Here are some tips that can help with building resilience.

Self-advocacy is the ability to speak up for what you need. Self-advocacy also means knowing your rights and about your pain condition so that you can be an “active manager” in your health. With good self-advocacy skills, you can be more confident in taking responsibility and control over your pain management.

It’s normal to experience anxiety and fear, especially during a global pandemic. However, it’s important to recognize triggers that can lead to pain flare-ups and learn how to manage them. Triggers can amplify negative emotions like fear and anxiety, which in turn can worsen the pain. Having a plan in place ahead of time can be helpful if you do experience a pain flare-up.

You may find it difficult to fall asleep or may wake up often through the night. Even if you get the right amount of sleep, you may still feel tired in the morning due to poor sleep quality. Ongoing poor sleep can lead to increased pain, stress, low mood, poor immune function, cognitive and memory decline, and so on.  The good news is that we can improve our sleep. Pain and sleep are linked.

Maintaining meaningful relationships and social support is an important part of overall health and well-being. Living with chronic pain can affect energy, mobility, relationships, and the ability to engage with others. During symptom flares, or when others may not fully understand the experience of pain, many people experience periods of loneliness or disconnection. At times, it may feel easier to withdraw than to participate socially.

Stigma is when someone is judged or experiences discrimination over something that distinguishes them from others – things like culture, gender, race, socioeconomic status, health, and more. People with chronic pain experience stigma from people in in their lives including family, friends, co-workers and perhaps most challengingly, health care providers.

Your body has a built-in response system for anything new or challenging, called the ‘stress response’. If something is perceived by the brain as uncertain or potentially difficult, you will experience a stress response. This can result in various physiological changes such as increased heart rate, “butterflies” in the stomach, or increased body temperature.  

Pain begins when specialized receptors called nociceptors detect potential threats or harm (i.e. touching a hot stove). These signals travel through peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and then to the brain to evaluate whether pain is necessary as a protective response. 

Living with chronic pain can impact your ability to work or maintain the career path you had prior to developing pain. If you continue in the same role or position, it’s likely you may need to make adjustments. If the work you are doing is no longer feasible, finding other forms of income can be an even bigger adjustment. An important part of transitioning back to work is communicating with co-workers and employers about what you need in order to manage pain successfully.

If you are a youth who lives with pain, you may feel unsure of where or who to turn to for help. Your experience with pain can have physical, psychological, and financial effects. Here are some things you can do and resources you can explore.