Emotional pain can often feel as strong as physical pain and at times can even cause symptoms of pain throughout the body. It can also have a detrimental impact on both short-term and long-term mental well-being, so getting appropriate help and treatment is important.
Emotional pain is at the root for the majority of reasons people seek out therapy. Emotions can lead to distressing thoughts such as “what if” thoughts or judgment thoughts (towards the self – sadness, or others – anger.) They can also make us feel uncomfortable physically (chest pain, fatigue, tension, stomach ache).
Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body.
Intense 'unbearable' mental (psychological) pain is defined as an emotionally based extremely aversive feeling which can be experienced as torment. It can be associated with a psychiatric disorder or with a severe emotional trauma such as the death of a child.
Research from 2020 suggests emotional pain activates the same regions of the brain that are associated with physical pain. The experience is very similar to injuring your body.
Pain caused by emotional distress such as rejection, loneliness, guilt, failure etc., is more deeply felt and cause longer-lasting damage to your health and quality of life than that caused by physical injuries. In extreme cases, it may even make you question if your life is worth living.
Studies have found that the female body has a more intense natural response to painful stimuli, indicating a difference between genders in the way pain systems function. A greater nerve density present in women may cause them to feel pain more intensely than men.
Emotional agony tends to affect and change the whole person, from our values and outlook on life to how we treat others. Learning how to recognize agony and its effects can help you channel those changes in a more positive direction.
These acute or chronic conditions can cause severe pain and rank high on a pain scale: Kidney stones. Childbirth. Trauma.
Emotional trauma can last from a few days to a few months.
Some people will recover from emotional trauma after days or weeks, while others may experience more long-term effects.
We tend to react to physical pain much more proactively than we do to emotional pain. Yet, short of catastrophic injuries or illnesses, emotional pain often impacts our lives far more than physical pain does.
“Pain can induce anxiety, depression, anhedonia and other behaviors. The mental and behavioral changes associated with pain are just as real as the physical sensations, and unless we understand how these things work together, we cannot truly provide people with pain relief.”
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.
Agitation or displaying anger, anxiety or moodiness. Withdrawal or isolation from others. Poor self-care and perhaps engaging in risky behavior. Hopelessness, or feelings of being overwhelmed and worthless.
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.
Trigeminal neuralgia
It is one of the most painful conditions known. It causes extreme, sporadic and sudden burning pain or electric shock sensation in the face, including the eyes, lips, scalp, nose, upper jaw, forehead, and lower jaw.
The aftermath of the root canal can affect your daily activities for a couple of days, make it difficult to eat, and require pain medication. Women who have needed root canal say it is worse than childbirth.
During a particularly stressful experience, the anterior cingulate cortex may respond by increasing the activity of the vagus nerve—the nerve that starts in the brain stem and connects to the neck, chest and abdomen. When the vagus nerve is overstimulated, it can cause pain and nausea.
Traumatic emotional stressor can be enough to cause physical damage to the heart, a syndrome known variously as takotsubo cardiomyopathy, stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome.”
Sadness may flood your body with hormones like cortisol. Excess stress hormones in the body can cause physical sensations in your heart and nervous system, like chest pain, itching, or a rapid heart rate.