Figure 1.

Brain mechanisms influenced by psychological therapies for pain. Psychological therapies for chronic pain may involve multiple components to directly target pain symptoms, such as cognitive restructuring, mindfulness, and exposure to painful stimuli, in addition to integrating treatment components to directly decrease anxiety symptoms. These differing pain treatment components may engage overlapping and partially distinct brain mechanisms, which in turn may independently regulate nociceptive processing and the experience of pain. Thus, combined therapeutic approaches hold the potential to engage multiple modulatory systems to optimize the treatment effect on pain symptoms.