Category: Back Pain | Author: Stefano Sinicropi | Date: December 30, 2025
Dealing with acute or chronic spine pain can be extremely stressful on both your mind and body. Because it’s easier to understand the physical impact of a spine issue, many patients overlook how their discomfort is affecting their mental and emotional state. Without the right mindset, it can be extremely difficult to overcome your back pain issue. We talk with all our patients about the mental side of back pain and how their perception of their condition can positively or negatively affect the success of their treatment plan. In today’s blog, we explain why it’s so important to view spine pain through the right lens, and how to reshape your perception if back pain is impacting your mental health.
How Spine Pain Impacts Your Pain Perception
Everyone wants to find the right treatment for their spinal condition, but if you’re struggling mentally with your back pain, it can be tough to find the right type of treatment. For example, a recent study out of Australia took a closer look at pain perception and a patient’s views on surgery. They found that when a person held “negative pain beliefs,” they were much more likely to want to undergo surgery to address the problem, even if that operation wasn’t the optimal treatment course. The negative pain beliefs analyzed for this study include:
- Pain catastrophizing
- Poor recovery expectations
- Self-efficacy (the ability to produce a desired result)
In other words, patients who didn’t believe they could reach their recovery goals, those who didn’t believe they had the power to help themselves overcome their back issue and those with exaggerated pain perceptions were all more likely to want to pursue surgery to address their underlying back issue, even if an operation wasn’t considered the optimal treatment strategy.
All three of those negative pain beliefs are something the patient can control and influence. That’s not to say that it will always be easy to overcome pain catastrophizing or to prove to yourself that you are capable of helping your body become a stronger version of yourself, but it is something you can work to influence. When we ignore our mental health and only focus on the physical impact of pain, it becomes much harder to treat our spine issue because these negative pain beliefs can push someone towards suboptimal treatment options or lead them to believe they have less control over their treatment outcomes than they really do.
It’s not always easy to reframe how you think about your back pain, but it’s something you’ll want to work on if you find yourself ruminating about your discomfort or questioning if the work you put in during treatment will be worth it. We find that helping to educate the patient (both in office and with handouts/trusted online material), explaining that they’ll get out what they put into a conservative care plan and ensuring they have a supportive circle they can lean on when things get challenging can all be helpful in building a healthy mindset about back pain and treatment. We put a lot of focus on the mental health of our patients because we know how important it is to tackle back pain on multiple fronts. We help patients manage the mental, physical and emotional toll of back pain so they have the best chance of making the strongest recovery possible.
For more information about reframing how you approach your back pain issue, connect with Dr. Sinicropi and the team at Midwest Spine & Brain Institute today at (651) 430-3800.
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