Key Takeaways
- Pain signals and the pain experience are distinct; one’s mental state influences how they perceive pain.
- Long-term pain can create a ‘pain body’ that shapes identity, but awareness of this difference can facilitate healing.
- Stress amplifies pain signals through cortisol release, making it essential to manage one’s mental approach to pain.
- Creating space between oneself and the pain allows for a healthier relationship with it and can reduce suffering.
- Acupuncture helps by calming the nervous system and allowing individuals to better address their pain experience.
An interesting pattern shows up again and again at Above and Beyond Acupuncture in Scottsdale. A patient walks in with serious physical issues, the kind of injury that should have in excruciating pain, and they are handling it surprisingly well. The next patient walks in with something minor in comparison and is barely holding it together. The pain is consuming them.
The difference is not internal strength or weakness. It is not who is tougher. Something else is going on, and it matters a lot if you have been living with chronic pain.
The truth is, two people can have the same pain signals coming from their body and have completely different experiences of it. Once you understand why, you will start to see options you didn’t know were available.
Your Pain Is Real
Before going any further, this needs to be clear. Your pain is real.
The body has millions of tiny nerve endings all over it, and their whole job is to send signals to your brain when something is going on. When those signals come in strong, you feel pain. There is nothing made up about it.
What pain research has shown over the last few decades is that the signals from your body and the experience of pain in your head are not the same thing. The signal travels up to the brain, and then your brain decides what to do with it. Some of that happens automatically. Some of it happens based on how you are feeling, what you are thinking, what you are afraid of, and how much attention you are giving the pain.
This does not mean all the pain is in your head. It means the experience of pain has more pieces to it than most of us were ever told.
When the Pain Takes Over
Something happens when a person has been in pain for a long time. The mind starts to wrap itself around the pain. The thoughts keep going back to it. The body braces against it. Every moment of the day starts to revolve around it.
After a while, the pain stops being something you have. It starts to feel like who you are. You are the person with the bad back. The person with the knee. The person with the headaches. The pain becomes the main thing about your life, and the more space you give it, the bigger it gets.
This is what gets called the pain body. It is the layer of identity that builds up around your actual pain over time. It is not the original injury. It is the way your mind has learned to relate to the injury. And here is the important part. The pain body is real, the suffering it produces is real, but it is a separate thing from the signal coming from your body. You can have a strong physical signal without being gripped by your pain body. You can have very little signal and feel completely overwhelmed by your pain body.
Just noticing this is a big deal. As long as you are fully wrapped up in the pain, there is no room to do anything else with it. You are the pain and the pain is you. The moment you can see that there is a difference between the signal and the way you are holding it, you have something to work with.
Why Stressing About Pain Makes It Worse
There is a real physical reason this matters. When your mind tightens around your pain, when you brace against it, when you start to panic about it, your body releases stress hormones. Mainly cortisol. The cortisol turns up the inflammation in your body. The extra inflammation makes the pain signal stronger. The stronger signal makes you more anxious. And around and around it goes.
The pieces on What Is Cortisol and Why Do I Have So Much of It?, What Is Inflammation?, and Am I Stuck in a Pain Cycle? go deeper into how this loop works.
The thing to understand is that the way you hold your pain has a direct effect on the chemistry making the pain. The patient who is gripped by their pain is also the patient whose body is making the chemicals that turn the pain up. The patient who has some space around their pain is also the patient whose body is making less of those chemicals. Your body listens to what your mind is doing.
Finding Some Space
What you are not being asked to do is talk yourself out of your pain. That is not what this is about. The pain is real and the body needs the right support to take care of it.
What you are being invited to do is create a little space between you and the pain. To notice it instead of being it. To watch the sensation move through you without your whole identity getting pulled into it.
This is not a trick or a one-time thing. It is a different way of being with your pain that takes practice. The first time you catch yourself wrapped up in the pain and step back a little, the space might only last a few seconds. With time, the space gets bigger. The pain starts to feel like something you are noticing rather than something that owns you. The stress chemistry calms down. The signal that has been getting amplified starts to ease.
A lot of patients are surprised by what they find. Some of what they thought was their pain turns out to have been the layer they built around it. When that layer gets thinner, the actual physical signal is what is left, and the actual physical signal is often much smaller than the whole experience had been.
How Acupuncture Helps
Acupuncture is a good fit for this work because it operates right at the place where your body and your mind meet. Treatment moves your nervous system out of the stress state that has been driving the cortisol loop. It releases the bracing in the muscles around the painful area. It calms things down enough that your mind can finally start to find a little room around the experience. The role of stress in physical pain is covered in Is Stress Causing My Physical Pain?.
For people who have been carrying pain for a long time, acupuncture creates the conditions where the relationship with the pain can start to shift. The body settles. The pain body loosens its grip. The original signal is still there, but you are a different person sitting with it.
Where to Start
If you have been living with pain that has been running your life, the next step is to come in and talk about what is actually going on. Reach out to Above and Beyond Acupuncture on North Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard in Scottsdale to schedule a consultation and find out what creating a little space around your pain could change about what you have been dealing with.
Schedule an appointment online or call us today to start your journey to relief.
