How We Perceive Pain

Three people can stub the same toe at the same time and all three may have different responses to the pain. Do we have different pain tolerances? No, but how we perceive pain can be very different. The way we interpret pain can be influenced by things like age, gender, expectations, emotions, and even memories of past experiences. If you expect something to hurt you are predisposing yourself to a higher degree of pain. Have you ever seen a small child trip and fall? There are times when they won’t shed a tear until someone asks “are you ok?” and then they will begin to realize that what happened could have caused pain. This type of pain, called ancillary pain, is what happens when you “work yourself up”.

The brain will send out signal nerve cells that will release painkillers that occur naturally in the body. These natural painkillers, like endorphins for example, will lessen the pain response. This is what happens when you take your mind off of what would be a painful experience and focus on other things, such as what happens when you meditate. Another example of this is the use of focus points when going through natural labor in Lamaze classes. The woman is conditioned to focus her energy and breathing onto a single object, and effectively blocks out pain. Men typically have a higher tolerance for pain because they are usually brought up to “not cry”. Pain can sometimes be seen as a sign of weakness instead of a normal bodily response, and therefore men will condition themselves to take more pain than is normal.

Things that can reduce the number of endorphins in the body are stress, anxiety, and depression. This reduction in endorphins means that the body will be responding to the pain message more severely than if you were not stressed, anxious, or depressed. The adage telling you to think good things and keep a positive mood may have some medicinal bearing when it comes to chronic pain.