Pain is not what you think!
How can I make the pain disappear? is the number 1 question I hear in my job.
You might be disappointed to hear it, but it's not so much about getting rid of pain as being OK with some discomfort and getting more accurate about feeling the sensations.
Pain isn't your enemy. It's a life-saving survival mechanism. The trouble is, as Amy Baxter nicely put it, it is a ''nagging, safety-obsessed exaggerating friend who is sometimes wrong''.
Neuroscientists learned a lot about pain in the last few decades. Still, very little of this precious knowledge trickles to the general public. Or to the health professionals, for that matter. But without understanding your pain, you have slim chances of overcoming it.
Most people think pain is an objective physiological process resulting directly from tissue damage. In other words: something bad happens and the brain simply receives the message from the body about it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In case of the pain that appears as a result of something that happened to your body, eg. You burned yourself, fell, and hit the knee or something like that (so-called ACUTE pain), the process goes like this:
1. special sensors eg. in your skin or fascia called nociceptors pick up the signal from a particular part of the body and take it to the area of the brain that receives bodily signals
and then, something unexpected happens:
2. there is a storm of connections in the areas of the brain responsible for memories, fear, meaning, and control.
Your brain takes all the data and processes them as soon as possible. The data coming from outside in the present moment are based on your sensory surfaces. The already existing data comes from your memory, beliefs, and experience.
Pain is a construct of your brain, though that doesn't make it any less real. You do feel it - that’s not your imagination. But it depends on the automated brain processes how strong it is and whether it’s there at all.
The context, the meaning is what decides how you perceive pain. 3 examples:
Children with severe burns feel less pain when they're with their caring mothers.
If a professional runner twists his ankle before a major sports performance, the pain will feel stronger than for a bookish office worker who doesn't need his ankle to function well so desperately.
If you feel a lump in your neck and read in Google that it might be cancer, it starts hurting more and more. Until you make an ultrasound test proving it's just an enlarged gland and the pain magically disappears.
Things get complicated even further with nociplastic (chronic) pain.
There, the whole process of creating pain sensation detaches from the input from your sensors. In other words, it has NOTHING to do with what’s going on in your body.
What might happen?
Scenario one: chronic pain of XYZ
Your injury has been with you for a while. Your brain learns that if you don't move, it doesn't hurt. So it protectively immobilises the area and becomes hyper-sensitive about it. It encodes the information that this is your ''vulnerable'' part.
Over time, the injury heals, as is the case with any tissue in your body apart from the nerve cells. But the memory of the injury persists, constantly keeping you in pain.
The fear that this pain is going to stay forever and will affect your whole life only intensifies the pain.
Eventually, you might get better. Months or years later, out of the blue (usually when you're feeling emotionally vulnerable and very stressed), the pain returns to the same spot. This recurring pain ''proves you'' that part of the body is broken and vulnerable. Meanwhile, the brain reverted to interpreting the slightest sensation in that area as pain as it had been programmed for that.
Scenario two: generalised chronic pain
The nervous system gets hyper-sensitive due to trauma or chronic stress. It begins interpreting every neutral and completely benign sensation as pain. That's the case with conditions such as IBS (a tiny bit of air in your gut feels very painful) or fibromyalgia (there is a sensation of generalised pain all over the body without anything causing that pain). Here, too, the more anxious you are about the pain and the more catastrophic thoughts you have, the stronger it becomes.
The brain LEARNS pain. The neurons that fire together, wire together. So, unfortunately, if you have ever experienced intense or chronic pain, you're more likely to feel it again in the future.
But is it all gloom and hopelessness?
No! And that's thanks to neuroplasticity, the ability of your brain and nervous system to adapt.
Hang on until the next blog post to hear how to prevent the brain from learning pain.
And if you would like me to accompany me in your healing journey, you can join the waiting list for the next edition of my flagship program Heal from Within.