Unlearn Your Pain: The Science of Recovering from Chronic Pain, Fatigue, Anxiety, and Depression

by Howard Schubiner

Migraines, back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue and a host of other chronic illnesses have crippled modern populations. For the past twenty years, Dr Howard Schubiner has been conducting clinical trials, writing more than 100 scientific papers and giving lectures to get to the root cause and find out how to reverse these insidious illnesses.

Unlearn Your Pain is the result of this work, revealing Dr Schubiner's life-changing program to effectively treat chronic pain, anxiety and depression.

Drawing on the latest neuroplasticity research and the science behind the mind-body connection, readers will be guided step-by-step towards a new understanding of how the mind affects our pain - both physical and emotional - and how we can take back control to live a pain-free life.

Genres: Health

436 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 28, 2026

Reviews

[Kirsten]

Helpful to learn the science and theory behind EAET. Had a few great take aways though. It was pretty dense and more academic, interested in his other book to see if it’s more engaging.

[Amari Lilla]

It’s truly the book that improved my life quality by 80%! If your doctors cannot find you anything, but you still feel sick, it’s the book for you. I thought I have MCAS or long covid, I spend a lot of time and money for allergy test, heart tests, was in hospital. I had allergic reaction to most of the food I ate. Every day for couple of months I’ve ate the same 20 food ingredients and my life was so miserable because of this. I was constantly tired with full blown reactions whenever I’ve tried anything else. I was already vegan didn’t need more limitations. I was given by the doctors EpiPen, recommendation to avoid sodium benzoate and no hope for change.

This book not only gave me hope but also explain what’s happening. Sceptic was I? Of course, but reading it doesn’t cost nothing, doctors had so many months to figure it out and they’ve been hopeless, what else can I try? A herb or yoga guru? I’ve read the book within days and started to practice the exercises in the book from the very beginning. Every day. I’ve even followed that one cruel exercise from emotional training twice. Within first week I’ve started eating tomatoes after months, then bread. Then I started with avocado. While eating I’ve experienced allergy but while doing the exercises at the end of the meal they’ve been gone. Crazy as it is, it’s about 3,5 week after I’ve started and I went yesterday to a Korean restaurant eating fried cauliflower with soy spice lots of spices and drinking beer. And nothing happened! And imagine that just 6 months before I thought I will die after a sandwich with avocado and fried soy sausage!

I didn’t believe in it, and now when I say it it sounds as if I was crazy, but I’ve experienced it and this book helped me. People say - oh your symptomem simply improved. Wrong - they wouldn’t have improved if not for those mental work I’ve put into it and the eye opening content of this book. I would have been still scared to touch those tomato or bread. I would still have my miserable limited diet and taking daily antiallergic pills.

This book was a game changer and I hope the research about these topic will finally reach the allergy departments in every hospital worldwide or at least they start to create specialist practices just for such seemingly not completely hopeless patients as I was.

[Fahula]

This is a fabulous resource book for anyone dealing with health issues that may be Neuroplastic in nature. It informs in an easily accessible way so that the reader does not feel bogged down with medical jargon. Numerous studies and patient cases are cited to support each chapter. The stories of the patients are both fascinating and inspiring. They cover so many different Neuroplastic conditions, making these stories relatable for a wide audience. This variety has the wonderful benefit of helping the reader feel heard and not alone on the healing journey.

I’ve seen Dr. Schubiner in many interviews where he is always sure to explain the difference between Neuroplastic conditions and “it’s all in your head” thinking. As in his interviews, his compassion towards others with chronic conditions comes through in the pages of this book. I appreciate how he includes his own personal examples of times where he needed to practice self-awareness and self-compassion related to his own symptoms.

So much hope here, folks!

[Irene Money]

Building on, but better than the work of Sarno.

First two sections are about building the case for the existence and prevalence of neuroplastic pain.
The last section is how to unlearn it.

Sadly, it ends with the point that modern medicine's incentives are not aligned to raise the profile of healing neuroplastic plain.

One callout: he provides multiple examples of the 80% who are healed immediately, or within a few weeks. It's only towards the very end that he acknowledges the rest, whose progress takes years.

[offee]

Part Three: Unlearning Pain provides good guidance, as does the PDF Content.

The first two parts have interesting but inessential stories. A few stances the author takes smack of ideology, but these stances are not fundamental to the proposed interventions.