Living with chronic or persistent pain can effect all areas of your life, from being able to work, to sleep, to relationships with family and friends. For many people with persistent pain, the pain has become their life.

Self- management is about utilising tools to take back control of your life. It is about looking at all aspects of your life and finding ways to make changes so you can get more from your life. As someone living with persistent pain has put it:

There are lots of tools available for self-management and not all of these will be suitable for all individuals. Learning how to use the tools can take time and everyone’s experience is different. The first step to understanding your pain is ensuring there is no underlying cause for the pain. Once any possible causes have been ruled out and/or managed you can explore some of the resources below to manage how you experience pain and how to live your life.

Live Well with Pain and the Ten Footsteps

‘Live Well with Pain’ offers a wide range of resources and support to help get you started on with self-management.

The Ten Footsteps are a good starting point which have been developed by other people with persistent or chronic pain, from things they have found have helped them. More information about the Ten Footsteps can be found here.

A summary of the Ten Footsteps is available here.

NHS Choices

NHS Choices also has more information on managing chronic pain, available from here.

This resource may be helpful to share with patients to help plan their care and what is important to them.

This diary resource is for patients to keep track of self care and their mental, physical and emotional health.

NHS England made a Decision Support Tool designed to help people aged 16 years and over think about what options they might like to consider regarding chronic pain.

This is another tool that can be useful to complete to help you think about what might be important to you and how to manage your quality of life.