Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation in the body — it's an experience that is profoundly shaped by the brain. The same injury can produce very different levels of pain in different people, and even in the same person at different times.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is a lot like an alarm system. It's designed to get your attention, to make you do something. And if the alarm never turns off, that's exhausting — it wears you down. But here's the key insight: the alarm isn't the injury. The alarm is your brain's interpretation of signals from your body, and that interpretation can change.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Most people think of pain as a signal from the body — a warning that something is wrong. But Yoni Ashar and his colleagues found that for many people with chronic back pain, the signal had become decoupled from any actual tissue damage. The brain had learned to generate pain on its own, independent of what was happening in the body.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation — it's also a psychological experience. And that means the brain can sometimes be recruited to fight pain itself. Researchers have found that when people feel cared for or loved, when they feel a sense of meaning or purpose, or when they have a strong sense of control over their lives, they actually feel less pain.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain depends not just on the signals traveling from the body to the brain, but also on what the brain expects to feel. When the brain anticipates pain, it can amplify those signals — and when it doesn't, the very same injury can feel far less intense.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

When pain signals travel to the brain, the brain doesn't just passively receive that information — it actively decides how much attention to pay to it. This means that pain is not simply a readout of damage in the body; it's a construction of the mind.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation but an emotion, something produced by the brain in response to a complex set of inputs. And because pain is constructed by the brain, our mental states can shape and even control how much pain we experience.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal from the body — it's an experience constructed by the brain. And that means our thoughts, emotions, and expectations can powerfully shape how much pain we feel. In some cases, simply understanding that pain is not always a reliable indicator of tissue damage can itself reduce suffering.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation — it's an experience. And that experience is profoundly shaped by what we believe about our pain, what we think is causing it, and how we feel about it emotionally.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation — it's also a psychological experience. And that means that the way we think about pain, the way we attend to it, the way we catastrophize about it or don't, can have a huge effect on how much we suffer.

TED

What Sitting All Day Does to Your Brain and Body | Keith Diaz | TED

Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains. They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health.