Wired into Pain

Though women more often tend to catastrophize their pain than do men, these same men are less willing to admit to their pain, fearing that it would make them look weak. Women’s higher sensitivity to pain is in accord with their higher sensitivity to all manner of external sensations, painful or not, such as light levels, noise, odor, temperature, e

Pain and depression share biological pathways and neurotransmitters in the brain, so they often coexist, exacerbate one another, and respond to similar treatment.

Could pain exist without consciousness? If you strip the emotion out of pain, are you just left with nociception, or a gray area that our imaginations struggle to fill? Perhaps more than for other senses, it is easy to forget that pain can vary, and hard to conceive of how it might.

Unlike pressing on the pleasure side, the dopamine that comes from pain is indirect and potentially more enduring. So how does it work?

Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanisms. In this case, the initial pain stimulus is followed by gremlins hopping on the pleasure side of the balance.

I read everything I could by John Sarno, a New York physician who had written several best-selling books about his conviction that a great deal of back, neck, shoulder, and carpal tunnel pain is caused by repressed negative emotions—such as stress, anger, and anxiety—in people inclined to bottle things up.