People with chronic pain who believe they would not be able to sleep are more likely to suffer from insomnia, thus causing worse pain.
The study could lead to specific cognitive therapy to cure insomnia and treat chronic pain.
It shows that the way chronic pain patients think about pain and sleep leads to insomnia and poor management of pain.
Esther Afolalu and colleagues from the University of Warwick in the UK have formulated a pioneering scale to measure beliefs about sleep and pain in long-term pain patients, alongside their quality of sleep - the first of its type to combine both pain and sleep and explore the vicious cycle between sleep and pain problems.
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The results show that the scale was vital in predicting patients' level of insomnia and pain difficulties.
With better sleep, pain problems are significantly reduced, especially after receiving a short course of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for both pain and insomnia.
The study has provided therapists the means with which to identify and monitor rigid thoughts about sleep and pain that are sleep-interfering, allowing the application of the proven effective CBT for insomnia in people with chronic pain.
"This scale provides a useful clinical tool to assess and monitor treatment progress during these therapies," she said.
"Thoughts can have a direct and/or indirect impact on our emotion, behaviour and even physiology. The way how we think about sleep and its interaction with pain can influence the way how we cope with pain and manage sleeplessness," said Nicole Tang, the study senior author.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
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