"Highlight: We often obsess about nighttime routines for good sleep, but mounting evidence shows that what we do during our waking hours is also important – a more holistic view that could ease the modern pressure to create a perfect environment for when our heads hit the pillow"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535272-800-why-sleep-quality-is-so-important-and-so-difficult-to-measure/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535273-000-what-nine-sleep-researchers-do-to-get-their-best-nights-rest/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejp.4779

Hot off the press. A new paper - brilliantly led by @jennalgillett.bsky.social and Arman Rakhimov - validates the use of the Self-Compassion Scale Short-Form in chronic pain and exploring its initial relationships with pain outcomes.

🧪Open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20494637241312070

Pain often goes hand in hand with trouble sleeping. Previously, our lab found that people with chronic pain tend to think about their sleep through the lens of pain and developed the PBAS to measure pain-related beliefs and attitudes about sleep (https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.6130).

Thanks to our colleagues in Korea (led by Prof Seockhoon Chung), we now also know that PBAS mediates the association between pain and insomnia. Using the Korean PBAS, they found the concept useful in explaining the pain-insomnia link in Asian countries/cultures.

New paper published in Behavioural Sleep Medicine: https://doi.org/10.1080/15402002.2024.2441786

We were intereviewed by Airing Pain's Paul Evans at the 2024 British Pain Society meeting, giving an update on our WITHIN study. The episode is out now.

Time Stamps: 

[00:00] Introduction by Paul Evans
Overview of Pain Concern’s work and the British Pain Society’s Annual Scientific Meeting 2024 as the context for the interviews.

[00:45] Professor Nicole Tang on Mental Defeat
She explains how chronic pain impacts identity and self-perception, drawing analogies from animal behavior. Discusses mental defeat as a predictor of distress and its relationship with suicidal behavior.

[02:27] Vicky Sandy-Davis on Person-Centred Care
She explains diagnostic overshadowing and highlights the importance of personalized care for individuals with learning disabilities and chronic pain. Shares challenges in supporting offenders with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system.

[16:26] Ian Taverner and Sarah Harrisson discuss Patient Involvement in Research
They discuss the value of integrating lived experiences of chronic pain sufferers into research.
They highlight the gap in representation of individuals with severe pain in public involvement initiatives. and advocate for meaningful participation of patients in shaping research.

[19:25] Nicole Tang and Jenna Gillett discuss the Warwick Mental Defeat Study and how mental defeat impacts pain management and affects levels of suicidal behaviour.

[30:00] Nicole Tang and Jenna Gillett discuss challenges in communicating research outcomes – the importance of making tools and findings accessible to clinicians and researchers. They talk about plans to share the mental defeat questionnaire for broader use in healthcare.