Understanding pain and your body

Understanding pain and your body

Pain is an experience that everyone has. It can serve as a survival mechanism that can let us know when we are in danger. We can all relate to the touching something hot, feeling pain and pulling away from the danger very quickly. This is acute pain.

If we did not feel pain we would not know when we were in danger, we would cause ourselves damage and we would not survive very long. There is a big difference between acute and persistent pain.  

Persistent pain is when a person has pain most days, for at least 6 months, for which there does not appear to be a cure. It often does not indicate ongoing damage even though it may feel like it. In the past we assumed that this was because we had not healed after an injury, but for most people we now know that this is unlikely.

Instead, the pain is less to do with injury to our bodies and more to do with our central nervous system. It is like the volume knob of our pain systems has been left turned up like a radio stuck on ‘loud’. It is important to understand that you can ‘turn the volume down’ again, but it often takes time and effort.  

Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the UK population (just under 28 million adults) are affected by persistent pain. In many cases, persistent pain has no clear explanation, and this can be frustrating.  

ALL pain no matter where it is felt is produced by the brain. Before your brain tells you “here is pain” it must first combine a heap of information and then try to make a sensible interpretation of it all.

It weighs up many aspects of your immediate environment as well as other life factors such as what you do for a job, your personal or cultural beliefs, whether you have had pain there before or even what you are planning to do in the future.

Only when it has done all this will it tell you whether you have pain. It does this incredibly quickly. In some situations, however, pain can hang around for longer than helpful.  

Nerves continuously change how ‘sensitive’ they are in response to what’s going on around them and this can sometimes lead to big changes in pain levels without immediate obvious reasons.

Nerves can get highly sensitive and develop reinforcing  ‘feedback loops’. The brain is clever at creating patterns of nerve connections which can become sensitised at even just thinking about a particular movement or activity.  

Pain is multi-dimensional and as it persists it becomes much more about other triggers than about damage to the tissue. 

Useful links and information

Whilst we strongly encourage you to explore the information that could help you manage your pain,  our service cannot take responsibility for the information contained in third party websites linked to these pages.

If you are registered with our service and have any concerns about any information you find, please let us know. 

• https://livewellwithpain.co.uk/
• https://livewellwithpain.co.uk/resources-for-people-with-pain/ten-footsteps-to-living-well-with-pain/
• https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/
• https://www.paintoolkit.org/
• https://evoolvepaincare.academy/
• https://painrevolution.org/