How You Can Change Your Experience of Pain

by Jasna Cameron

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional"

There can be no life without pain. I don’t mean this in a purely mystical poetic sense, alluding to the countless works of art driven by passions born of human suffering. I mean this in a very straightforward, scientific way from a biological perspective. If we did not feel pain, we would die. And yet, as much as we need to feel it to survive, we spend our lives learning how to avoid it.

What is Pain?

Pain is a survival instinct. It tells the brain to switch on our fight or flight response.  The brain processes this message and sets in motion all the necessary physical and chemical responses, such as activating the correct muscles or increasing the heart rate to cope with the crisis.  The transition of the high alert message that something is wrong from the point of injury through the nervous system to the brain is the biology of pain. If we didn’t feel pain, we would land up impaled on a knife or frozen to death within days.

The Pain Model

The psychology of pain is much more complicated. As defined by Engel in 1977, the biopsychosocial model of pain offers the most comprehensive theoretical approach to pain. It encompasses different aspects ranging from biological to psychological as well as social components.

Many different factors come together to process the feeling of pain for the person experiencing it. The extent of the injury itself is only one factor that defines how we experience it. As much as our behavior and emotions are influenced by the physical experience of pain, the reverse is also true. The physical experience of pain is affected by our emotions and our attitude.

The experience of pain has many dimensions, and it differs from person to person in levels of intensity and quality.

What is Suffering?

What translates into suffering due to pain is the psychological aspect of the pain experience. The psychological experience of pain can be moderated by mindful practices and adjustments to our beliefs about pain.

By redefining our understanding of the pain, we can change our emotional and mental response and minimize and even eliminate the suffering which follows the physical response.

How we identify the pain and how we react to it is shaped by our genetic makeup, upbringing, personality, culture and the age we belong to, and the different circumstances surrounding us.

Our basic concept of pain as a negative experience puts us at a disadvantage from the very start.

How Does Culture Influence Our Experience of Pain?

Our cultural background influences our general beliefs about pain. For example, we often think that we should address pain immediately or stay away from it, feel that we have no power over it, or that it is a sign of weakness and damage, and equates it with disability and a lack of independence.

Studies performed in 2007 also indicated that reactions to pain differ between different ethnic groups. These deeply embedded cultural beliefs form the basis of our learned responses to pain shaped in our early childhood by modeling our parents’ behavior.

I was raised in a culture where pain was almost glorified to the extent that it had everyone competing for this grotesque badge of honor. It is is is a culture where catastrophizing pain is the norm.  Suffering was amplified through exaggerated attention to pain, stressing the accompanying depression and disability. The champion sufferers were receivers of constant sympathy and help from their family, friends, and neighbors than was needed. This was a sure way to avoid envy and sabotage, and it made everyone feel good in the end, the receivers and the givers. But it created a vicious circle where the pain became a default mode, slightly more exacerbated by free medical care and where pain tablets were more common than candy.

Many years later, I married into a culture where admitting to pain was judged as a show of weakness, frowned upon, and avoided at any cost. The expected response to any pain, whether physical or psychological, is resentment, aversion, and resistance. This response is the other unhealthy extreme, leading to compulsive escapism through avoidance strategies and distractions, often culminating in chronic addictions. Within this paradigm of culturally imposed values, pain is not addressed effectively because it is preferable not to acknowledge or admit to it at all. This unhealthy resistance creates suffering in the form of blockages, restlessness, anxiety, anger, irritability, denial, and control issues.

The Healthy Response to Pain

Both of the extremes on this spectrum will facilitate suffering in some form or another. We may not be able to avoid the physical sensation of pain ( and we shouldn’t if we want to survive), but we can choose not to suffer as the result of it.

Knowing that psychological and cultural factors can worsen pain, we owe it to ourselves to discover all the different strategies and mindful practices that can improve our painful experience.

How to Cope with Pain

In one study, the scientists used an fMRI scanner to show people their brain activity in moments of physical pain. Visualizing a physical manifestation of the pain enabled the participants to manage and reduce that pain through deliberate and focused attention. The pain was represented as a flame that would flare up in a specific area of the brain. Gradually the participants succeeded in controlling the size of the flame, regardless of the intensity of the pain inflicted upon them.

Even if there may still be some doubt about whether mindful practices can help reduce the physical intensity of pain, there is a lot of research analyzing how mindfulness can help the psychological experience of pain

An excellent new way to approach pain is by increasing self-compassion, awareness, and acceptance and reducing stress, negative repetitive responses, and avoidance strategies.

Devote some time to researching the mindful practices which may work for you:

• You may try simply tuning into the physical sensation without expanding further with ongoing thoughts about pain.

• You may try changing the narrative by referring to pain differently.

• Giving it a different name may take away some of its power. How does “discomfort” sound? Or even “irritation” or “tenderness’?

Other mindfulness practices that are helpful with improving the experience of pain range from taking action to address the challenging (painful) moment you find yourself in, compartmentalizing (not letting one negative aspect of your life spill over into other areas) to exercising, meditating, praying, practicing gratitude and connecting with others.

Conclusion

Mindfulness allows you to take control of the suffering induced by the pain you experience. It is reassuring to know that so much research has been done to minimize the suffering we experience.

There is no life without pain. But we have been given an opportunity to take control, manage it better and improve our quality of life.