Your Nervous System as an Alarm System
What's the purpose of pain?
Well, pain's job is to help keep your body safe from physical harm. However, this "protector" can get out of control, like a security guard on a power trip or a car alarm that won't turn off.
Basically, we all experience real, physical pain when our brains find our bodies in danger. Pain helps keep your body safe by grabbing your attention and prompting you to take action to make the threat go away.
Without pain, it would be difficult to survive!
Your Nervous System as an Alarm System
Your nervous system includes your brain, spinal cord, and nerves. When it comes to physical danger to your body, your nervous system functions like a security alarm system.
This security alarm system continually monitors for threats and dangers to the "tissues" of your body. If the alarm goes off, your brain will create a series of protection resposnes to help you.
These protection responses include experiencing pain and changes in your attention, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and more.
Your Brain and Nervous System Can Learn:
The Sensitive Alarm System
Your nervous system is fascinating, complex, and powerful. It changes, learns, and adapts to anything it does routinely. With the right environment and influences, it can even improve its ability to protect you with pain!
At times, and for some people, the nervous system can adapt to be a bit too good at protecting us from potential threats. An overly-protective, extra-sensitive, and reactive nervous system can keep you in chronic pain. Even more, your nervous system can be extra-sensitive regardless of your injury or diagnosis!
The Chronic Pain Cycle and How To Get Out Of It
Are you in the chronic pain cycle? In some situations, the longer you've been in pain, the better you get at making it. In turn, the better your nervous system gets at making pain, the longer you have pain for!
It's a vicious cycle.
Basically, your nervous system can "learn" chronic pain just as it does a language. It is up to you to learn a new, more helpful language, not the pain tune. Of course, there are conditions and disease states that can predispose the body to pain, but how your nervous system processes pain can improve!
The first thing to do is to learn more about pain and the human body. The more you understand how everything works, the less threatening pain becomes, and the better action you can take.
Less threat = less protection and less protection = less pain.
Did you know that learning about pain to make your pain go down is actually research-backed? It is called "Therapeutic Pain Neuroscience Education" in the science world. To escape chronic pain, you'll also need to learn how to take effective action through habits, behaviors, and activities to reduce your pain.