The Pain Relief Secret: How to Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain

stems control functions that are essential to life, like breathing and heart rate. Even if we experience brain damage, we can continue to live as long as our brain stem is intact and functioning correctly.

We experience neuroplastic pain when our nervous system becomes oversensitive as a result of being in chronic pain.

Chronic, localized inflammation occurs most often as a result of poor body mechanics. If we constantly put unnatural or excessive strain on our knees, for example, we can easily damage cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. In its constant effort to protect us, our immune system will wage war against the damaged cells. The resulting inflammation is a c

Injury and inflammation make neurons more responsive, and lasting pain leads to an increase in the number of neurons that respond to pain signals.

Another important aspect of this phenomenon is that stress-induced analgesia typically occurs when there’s an external stressor that takes attention away from the pain—like someone threatening our life, or the need to escape

Muscle pain and fatigue force us to slow down, preventing us from doing permanent damage to ourselves. So the next time you have to take a break due to exhaustion or a burning sensation in your muscles, say a little “thank you” to your body for keeping you in check and preventing you from hurting yourself.

Until recently, we thought the nervous system was hardwired to sense and perceive pain in a predictable, unchanging way. We now know that changes within our nervous systems affect the way we experience pain. Pain we feel as a result of these adaptations is called neuroplastic pain.

In order to contract, our muscles use ATP as a source of energy. ATP is used in numerous other physiological functions as well, including synthesizing DNA and perceiving taste. It also participates in nociception because damaged cells release ATP, which activates nociceptors. Because of its important role in so many processes, ATP is constantly bei

Sometimes, no matter how hard we breathe, we simply can’t take in enough oxygen to keep up with our muscles’ energy demands. When cells don’t get enough oxygen, they’re forced to create energy through a far less efficient process called anaerobic metabolism. In this process, glucose is synthesized into ATP without the help of oxygen, and lactic aci