Pain is not created in one single place in the body. It is the result of a constant conversation between your tissues, nerves, spinal cord and brain. Understanding that conversation can make long-standing pain feel a little less frightening and a lot more workable.
A helpful way to picture it is to imagine your nervous system as a very sensitive alarm system. Sensors in the body send information upwards, and the brain decides how loudly to sound the alarm at any given moment. Pain is one of the main ways that alarm is felt.
Signals travelling from the body
All over your body there are tiny sensors in skin, muscles, joints and organs. They are constantly sending messages to the spinal cord about:
- temperature, pressure and stretch
- inflammation or irritation in tissues
- how quickly or forcefully you are moving
- changes in blood flow, breathing and gut activity
On their own, these messages are not yet pain. They are raw data, like numbers on a dashboard. Pain only appears when the brain receives that data and decides that you may need protecting.
How the brain makes sense of those signals
The brain does not read signals in a simple, mechanical way. It does not ask, “How big is this signal?” and then create pain to match. Instead, it blends body messages with many other pieces of information, including:
- your current stress levels and emotional state
- how safe or unsafe your surroundings feel
- memories of previous injuries, illnesses or flare ups
- what you have been told about your body and diagnosis
- beliefs picked up from family, media and health professionals
Using all of this, the brain makes its best guess: “Do I need to create pain to protect this person right now?” If the answer is yes, pain is produced. If the answer is no, the same signals can pass through with very little pain, or none at all.
Pain as a protection signal, not a simple damage gauge
This means that pain is better understood as a protection signal than a damage meter. A small amount of physical change can trigger strong pain if the system believes you are in danger, while significant changes can sometimes cause little pain if the system feels safe.
Everyday examples show this. People in accidents sometimes walk on a broken bone before they realise what has happened, while others can have intense pain from a minor strain when they already feel stressed, exhausted or frightened. The amount of pain is not a moral judgement or a sign of weakness; it reflects how threatened the system feels.
Why pain can continue after tissues have healed
When pain has been present for a long time, the nervous system can become sensitised. Nerves may fire more easily, the spinal cord may pass more signals upwards, and the brain may default to protection more quickly than before. The alarm system is turned up.
This can show up as pain appearing with light movements, symptoms that seem to spread or move around, or flare ups that track stress, sleep and emotion more than any clear injury. None of this means your pain is imagined. It means the system that produces pain has become highly reactive - and systems that have been turned up can, with the right input, be turned back down again.
What this understanding can change for you
Recognising that pain comes from an interaction between brain and body can soften some of the fear around symptoms. Instead of assuming “there must be something badly wrong in this spot”, it becomes possible to consider that a sensitised protection system may be involved.
This perspective does not take away the need for sensible medical checks, and it does not mean you are to blame for your pain. It simply opens up more ways to work with your nervous system - through education, gentle exposure, emotional support, pacing, movement and other neuroplastic approaches.
Many people find that once they see pain as a changeable process rather than a fixed verdict, they feel less trapped and more able to experiment with small, manageable steps. Over time, this is often how the alarm system begins to settle.