Our ancestors who were quick to notice danger were more likely to survive. As a result, the human brain became highly sensitive to anything that might signal harm.
To keep us safe, our brain evolved to constantly scan the world for various dangers and to learn from past experiences. If this threat detection had to always be done consciously, it would not only be exhausting but it would also be impossible.
It’s a good thing that your unconscious mind takes over by learning shortcuts linking certain places, movements, times of day, scents, sounds or situations with threat. This is completely normal and helps us survive.
In chronic pain, these learned shortcuts are the problem as they have now become overprotective.
If your brain has associated sitting, lying down, getting out of bed, bending, lifting, driving, or stress with “danger”, it will create a shortcut to trigger pain in those situations automatically even if your body is no longer injured and no longer in danger.
The pain is real, but it is being generated by a nervous system that is making false predictions trying to protect you.
Research shows that fear and expectation can increase how strongly we feel pain.
In this fascinating study, published in the journal “PAIN”, healthy subjects received a painful stimulus on their skin while looking at a series of photos, some of which were scary and others neutral. Even though the pain stimuli were identical, the subjects rated their pain to be greater when they were primed with the scary photos.
What’s most interesting is that sometimes the subject who were looking at the scary images reported of experiencing pain even when no stimulation was given.
Like the horror film phenomenon, the fear from the scary pictures put their brains on high alert to experience more fear and pain.
What we learn is that a state of fear can change how we perceive neutral sensations as pain, even in the absence of physical danger… the brain is primed to protect, even if it means occasionally (or regularly) making false predictions.
This doesn’t mean the pain is “in the head.” It means the brain has learned a pattern. The good news is that the pattern can be changed and old danger associations can be weakened and in time erased.
This can be achieved through the right education, gradual exposure, and changing how one responds to pain.