Scientists who study pain and doctors who treat pain consider the experience a strictly physical phenomenon, in the sense that it can only be caused by injury to the body.
Physical pain usually leaves few echoes (unless the circumstance of the injury was emotionally traumatic) while emotional pain leaves numerous reminders, associations, and triggers that reactivate our pain when we encounter them.
But unfortunately, just like pain can make you feel worse mentally, your mind can cause pain without a physical source, or make preexisting pain increase or linger. This phenomenon is called psychogenic pain, and it occurs when your pain is related to underlying psychological, emotional, or behavioral factors.
And the research indicates that people can experience pain for the wrong reasons or fail to experience it when it would be very reasonable to do so. Moreover, when pain is disconnected from the physical reality, it is an illusion, too.
Only Certain Kinds Of Pain Can Be Controlled With Your Mind
“But chronic pain and pain without a source can be managed with your thoughts. There is a big emotional tie between pain and your thoughts, and by altering your thoughts you can alter the pain.” The CDC estimates that 20.4% of US adults live with chronic pain.
The direction of sex differences in pain responses across multiple stimulus modalities and pain measures is highly consistent, with women showing greater sensitivity than men.
Pain is more than a physical sensation - it has psychological, emotional and biological components. These components influence the intensity with which individuals experience pain, how debilitating the pain is, and how effective treatment is likely to be.
“All pain is real, no matter what is causing it. But also, all pain is made by the brain in response to the information available to it.” According to his work and that of others, the degree of pain is not a reliable indicator of the severity of injury. And sometimes there is pain without any tissue damage at all.
Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.
Pleasure is a general term for good feelings. People get pleasure from eating, sleeping, watching TV, or anything else they enjoy. Pleasure is the opposite of pain. Pain feels bad, but pleasure feels good.
Differences were especially strong in pain tolerance—even though male participants had higher tolerance, female participants were less variable across visits. According to the researchers, this was the first study to measure gender differences in the test-retest reliability of pain sensitivity in humans.
Physical activity, especially aerobic exercise, can also raise pain tolerance and decrease pain perception. One study found that a moderate to vigorous cycling program significantly increased pain tolerance. Mental imagery refers to creating vivid images in your mind, and it can be useful for some in managing pain.
Brain research
In numerous studies females score higher than males in standard tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and empathy.
Much research has shown that women are more empathic than men. Yet, women and men are equally forgiving. However, it is not clear whether empathy is more important to forgiveness for men or for women.
Women around the world report higher levels of life satisfaction than men, but at the same time report more daily stress. And while this finding holds across countries on average, it does not hold in countries where gender rights are compromised, as in much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
As we review next, these studies indicate not only that the level of empathy is positively correlated with pro-social behavior, but also that females may be more empathic and thus more altruistic than males.
In animals, pain studies have had every possible outcome: males have higher tolerance, females do, and there is no gender difference at all. "Human studies more reliably show that men have higher pain thresholds than women, and some show that men have a higher pain tolerance as well," Graham adds.
Some people can handle more pain than others
We feel pain because of the signals that are sent from our sensory receptors, via the nerve fibres, to our brain. Everyone's pain tolerance is different and can depend on a range of factors including your age, gender, genetics, culture and social environment.
Pain tolerance is the maximum amount of pain a person can withstand. There's a threshold where pain just becomes too much to bear. At that point you take steps to either remove the cause of pain or decrease the pain sensations by taking medications or putting hot or cold on the area that's painful.
It involves submerging your hand into a bucket of ice-cold water. You'll tell whoever is administering the test when you start to feel pain. Your pain threshold is determined by the amount of time between the start of the test and your first report of pain. Once the pain becomes unbearable, you can remove your hand.
Hormones may play a role in women having more pain sensitivity. In addition, women have greater nerve density (more nerves in a given area of the body)—which may cause women to feel pain more severely than men. In addition, women's psychological experience of pain differs from men's in certain ways.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is a rare disorder, first described in 1932 by Dearborn as Congenital pure analgesia. Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA) is a very rare and extremely dangerous condition. People with CIPA cannot feel pain [1].
insensitive. adjective. not feeling the physical effect of something such as pain, heat, or cold.
OTHER WORDS FOR excruciating
1 unbearable, insufferable, unendurable, agonizing, racking.