How to Reverse Negative Thinking for Pelvic Pain Relief

You may know that negative thinking is hard on your body and contributes to pain and illness. You may even have a healthcare provider who recommends that you “reduce stress” and try to think more positively in order to calm your nervous system and heal your body. If so, and you’ve tried to think more positively, you probably also know that this is much easier said than done.

Nothing triggers stressful, negative, fearful thinking like pain and illness.

When your health is compromised and you’re experiencing pain or other symptoms that you don’t understand, that isolate you and limit your ability to do the things you want to do, your brain’s emotional centers, particularly the amygdala, can become overactive.

The amygdala is part of the limbic system and often referred to as the reptilian brain (or what I call your lizard brain). It is the part of your brain that stores emotional memory and is wired to keep you safe. One way it does this is to scan the environment for potential danger. When it finds one, it triggers the sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response) to prepare your body to run, fight, or freeze.

The Stress Response

When activated, this fight or flight response leads to the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate, muscle tension, blood flow away from the digestive and reproductive tracts, and a host of other physiological responses that are meant to help you respond to an immediate threat.

This response is adaptive when the danger in your immediate environment is something you can run from or fight with (like a bear). But when the danger is coming from your mind – there is nothing to run from or fight with. As a result, your sympathetic nervous system remains chronically activated, causing the release of stress hormones, chronic tension, and over time a sensitized nervous system that can perpetuate pain.

If you’re experiencing pelvic pain, the dangers your lizard brain is finding may sound something like this:

• “What if this never gets better?”
• “I have no control.”
• “I’m letting people down.”
• “What if I can never enjoy sex again?”
• “I’m alone. No one understands.”

Because your body doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and one created in your mind, these thoughts can continue to activate your stress response, amplifying pain and anxiety and creating a feedback loop that feels unbreakable.

If you’ve tried to think more positively and haven’t had success, go easy on yourself. You’re stuck in a cycle that is having a physiological impact on your body that is making it hard to shift.

Understanding this cycle is the first step to breaking it, and with effective strategies, you can cultivate a more positive mindset! The following is a process that has helped hundreds of my clients release the cycle of negative thinking and the impact it is having on their pain.

How to Break the Negative Cycle

Step One: Listen to Your Inner Lizard

Acknowledge your negative thoughts about your symptoms, the future, and anything else that is causing you stress. Instead of trying to suppress these thoughts (which is usually not effective), write them down. Writing down your thoughts allows you to work with them and can help you to view them more objectively. Remember, these thoughts are a natural response to your pain and stress, and to change them you first need to become more aware of them.

Step Two: Identify Your Thoughts

Review the thoughts you’ve written down and categorize them. What is your lizard doing? Is she worrying, catastrophizing, or making negative predictions? Is she obsessively trying to figure it out, striving for perfection, or judging you? Identify a category for each of the thoughts you’ve written down. This engages the prefrontal cortex, the more evolved part of your brain, which can inhibit the amygdala’s activation and interrupt the stress cycle. This will begin to give you more space to make different choices about how to use your mind.

Step Three: Name the Story

Now read back through your negative thoughts and look for common themes. If these thoughts were a story, what would the title be? For instance you might have a “No One Understands” story, an “I Can’t Do It” story, or an “I’m Doomed to a Life of Pain and Misery” story. Now every time you notice that story come up during your day, say to yourself, “Oh, there’s the ‘I can’t do it’ story again”. Naming these stories makes it easier to recognize their frequency and interrupt their impact. When you catch yourself thinking a particular story for the 999th time in one day, it will begin to lose its power and believability. You may even start to see some humor in it!

Step Four: Breathe

Now that you have some space from the thoughts, you want to release the fight or flight response directly in your body. The simplest way to do this is to focus on your breath. Place a hand over your low belly, just below your belly button. As you inhale, allow your belly to expand. Exhale, feeling your belly fall. This gentle, intentional breathing connects you to your body. If your lizard brain starts to chime in, kindly let it know you’ll listen later, and then bring your attention back to your breath ‘for now’. Counting your breath can also help maintain your focus.

Moving Forward

These four simple steps—Listen, Identify, Name, and Breathe—can significantly improve your ability to think more positively even while you’re in pain. Practicing them several times a day will break the negative feedback loop and begin to change how you respond to negative thought patterns. By becoming aware of your body and lizard’s stories, you create space to choose thoughts that calm your nervous system and support your healing.

Want to learn more about how to heal pelvic pain using a mind body approach?

Click here to watch my free master class Say Goodbye to Pelvic Pain.

Lorraine Faehndrich, NBC-HWC is a pelvic pain recovery coach with 13+ years of experience helping women relieve pelvic and sexual pain using a mind body approach. Her Healing Female Pain Program has helped hundreds of women find lasting relief from vulvodynia, vaginismus, interstitial cystitis, pudendal neuralgia, painful sex and other pelvic pain.