Pain is a signal from the brain to take action because it is perceiving a threat to our safety.
Most obviously, touch a hot stove with your finger and the action is to remove the finger immediately. The threat level to your finger is extreme and the subsequent burn will hurt. What most people don’t realise, as they slump on the sofa in the evening snarfing down pork pies whilst yelling at the television, is that that same burn will hurt some people much more than it will hurt others.
Those who would experience least pain will be taking very good care of themselves and actively managing their lives so that overall, they are happy. In Western society these people are rare and most of us live stressful lives: even if only from sitting down for most of the time, which causes muscles, bones and fascia to adapt to that body position. Never mind not fully rehabilitating that ankle we damaged when we fell over from reacting to burning our finger on the stove when we were eight years old.
Time goes on. We’re married with young children. The children do not sleep well; and so both partners are cranky due to lack of sleep. We bought a splendid house that is slightly beyond our income, so money is short and the breadwinner’s job is at risk. He is convinced she spends the day having coffee with her mates and she bitterly resents that he offers minimal help around the home.
Both are concerned about their weight. Both skip meals as a result and then snack on whatever comes to hand, calling that snack ‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’ or whatever. (Goodness, I wish I were making this up.)
This means that both are stressed from being tired, worried about money, unhappy in their relationship and badly nourished. This is interpreted by the brain as being under multiple threats: the brain is tired and can’t concentrate properly – potentially lethal when driving; their lovely home or place of safety is at risk from lack of money; an unhappy relationship again poses a threat to their place of safety plus ongoing stress from arguments and misunderstandings and so on; poor nutrition is perceived as a threat because the brain and body are not getting the nutrients they need to perform.
It all mounts up.
If either partner touches that stove now the chances are very high that as they zing the finger away, something else will happen too like a muscle in their neck go into spasm or they’ll whack someone across the face and so on. And the pain from the burn will be much more intense. And the neck spasm will be agonising. And whoever gets smacked across the face will yell like a banshee.
Pain is a signal from the brain to take action to reduce threat. When we are happy, feeling optimistic, sleeping well, eating well and so on, due to various factors like neurotransmitters, breathing and physical posture, these things literally lower the experience of pain. Pain lowering neurotransmitters include serotonin, GABA and oxytocin – the latter being released by cuddling, stroking a pet or having sex. In this situation, I doubt there is much joyful sex going on. When we are happy, we have a spring in our step, we smile and laugh a lot, we are relaxed both physically and mentally. Our shoulders are not in our ears. And there is even a possibility that we are breathing well. How exciting is that.
When we are unhappy or angry, our posture and gestures reflect this: shoulders in our ears and maybe slumped and feet dragging or tense and jaw grinding. So a sudden jerk with our arm can easily cause a spasm in those shortened neck muscles that are already busy holding our shoulders up whilst frantically hanging onto that poor head that is permanently poking forwards.
For the brain to perceive pain, the pain causing event goes through various stages, including transmission by neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters that carry the pain message up to the brain include glutamate and Substance P. Glutamate makes us feel jittery – exactly as if we’ve drunk too much coffee. Substance P is its bedfellow and is very much associated with anxiety and stress; it is one of the many chemicals whizzing about the brain to produce these sag making feelings. Some anti-depressant type medications are based around chemicals that block the uptake of Substance P in the brain.
So to pick on one tiny component, if we are upset and anxious already then we hurt ourselves, this leads to even more Substance P being generated, so we experience even more pain than we would if there were no pre-existing substance P. And feel even more depressed.
Add a little more threat and the pain will be even worser:
In whipping our finger away from the stove, we whack one of our children across the face and they go off like a steam whistle, running to the other partner that, ‘Daddy/Mummy just hit me!! AND FOR NO REASON!!!!’ Yell, yell, scream, scream, snot pouring forth and so on. Partner storms in in battle mode. Now that finger really hurts…….
Therefore if we are already under threat from many different sources adding another threat of any type will directly make the experience of pain just so much worse.