How Can A Pain Journal Help Manage Pain?

What Is a Pain Journal?

Pain or symptom diaries can help you record your pain experience or symptoms, which can be shared with your doctor to help them better manage your condition, help you manage your pain and help you understand your condition and pain better.

Why keep a Pain Journal?

Pain can be hard to describe

Whether your pain is short (acute) or long-term (chronic), everyone experiences pain differently. Pain can be a complex experience because it’s invisible which makes it difficult to describe. It can sometimes seem frustrating or difficult when talking to others about pain or when asking for help. Some people may worry that their pain might not be taken seriously. It can also be difficult to remember the details of your pain experience, days or weeks later.

Keep an accurate, daily record

A pain diary can help you to keep accurate notes on your daily pain experience and other details relating to your health or condition, at the time that you’re experiencing it.

Make positive changes

Using a pain diary can help you make positive personal changes, such as better self-management, improved self-awareness, and may make it easier to communicate with HCP about their pain conditions. It may also help improve mood and negative thinking, impact the way pain is managed.

Many people find that keeping a diary can help:

• as an outlet for your emotions
• to reflect on how you’re feeling
• you feel more in control.

Optimal pain management

You are the only one who fully understands your own pain and how it affects you daily. By sharing information recorded in a pain journal, you help your doctor to track and manage your pain. Without this information, doctors and nurses can only ask about pain during occasional visits, which doesn't give a complete picture of what you might be experiencing over time. Without enough information about your pain experience, it can be difficult for your doctor to advise on or to prescribe the most effective amount of pain medicine and pain management overall. Incorrect pain management may lead to inadequate pain control.

Holistic treatment

Pain journalling between visits to your doctor helps them figure out which other types of treatment, like physical therapy, might work best. When you’re able to record your symptoms in real-time, it provides valuable information that can improve your holistic medical care based on more reliable information, than recall.

Tips for Keeping an Effective Pain Management Journal

Here are some useful tips that you can follow, to help you keep a pain journal:

Use Your Pain Journal Frequently

It might be tough remembering the details every time you have pain. Record your pain each day and take it with you to your next appointment. If you feel that your pain is not well controlled, you may want to fill it in every 1 to 2 hours. If the pain is better controlled, you can fill it in every 4 to 6 hours. It may also help your doctor, by filling it in at least twice a day.

Even if you’re struggling to cope with pain and are finding it difficult to regularly use your pain diary, any information you record, can still give doctors insights into your pain experience and your difficulties. Your doctor may be able to recommend therapies such as CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and guidance on how to use a pain diary, which may help to improve your pain management. A pain diary might not be helpful for everyone, but it can be a simple tool to help doctors better understand and treat a person's pain.

What to Log in Your Pain Journal

Things to include in your pain diary:

• Your pain levels, for example, on a scale of one to 10.
• How long does the pain last?
• Describe the part of your body where you first felt the pain. Is it in one area or more than one, or does it spread over time?
• Describe the pain sensation, for example, was it burning or cold?
• How did it make you feel, for example, did it exhaust you?
• How did it affect your body, for example, did your joints feel stiff or swollen, or your muscles ache?
• Include activities you did that day, such as exercise, activities like gardening or sitting at a desk
• Describe your sleep quality, for example, a full night’s sleep, interrupted, duration/how long you slept, etc
• Record your medication, and how much you took, how you felt after taking the medicine and any side-effects you may have experienced for example, constipation, drowsiness, confusion.
• Record all approaches that you took to self-manage your pain
• Try to describe your state of mind or mood, for example happy, frustrated, excited, sad etc
• What did you eat and/or drank?
• Did you try any home therapies or treatments, and did they help your pain or mood?
• Include any positive thoughts or actions, for example, something that may have worked or relieved symptoms, or something that lifted your mood or made you happy.
• Include any activities/things you did that made your pain better or worse.

Be as Descriptive as Possible

Words to describe pain

When describing your experience of pain, these words might help you:

• aching
• burning
• constant
• crushing
• dragging
• dull
• gnawing
• intense
• nagging
• nauseating
• numb
• prickling
• sharp
• shooting
• sore
• spreading
• stabbing
• stinging
• tender
• throbbing
• tingling
• tiring
• unbearable.

Showing where your pain is

Using a pain journal that includes a body map (a picture of a person) to show where your pain is, can be helpful, particularly if it’s in more than one area or if it spreads. Here’s an example of a body map:

Describing your pain intensity:

Some pain journals include pain scales. You can either describe your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 or use faces to show pain intensity. Here are some examples:

Starting your pain journal

You can use a paper diary, a notebook or a journal. You could record notes on your computer or your phone or you could download an app to your computer or smart phone.

Mobile health apps

Mobile health apps can help with pain management. There are several pain journalling apps that can be downloaded from either the Google Play or Apple App Stores.

Nurofen Pain PASS

Nurofen has designed the Pain PASS – a free virtual pain diary to help you navigate your pain journey with confidence. Find out more here: www.nurofen.co.uk/see-my-pain/pain-pass/