How Pain Tolerance and Anxiety Seem to Be Connected (Heather Murphy, The New York Times, Mar 30 2019)
“An article this week about Jo Cameron, who has lived for 71 years without experiencing pain or anxiety because she has a rare genetic mutation, prompted questions from New York Times readers.
The notion that the same gene could be responsible for the way a person processes physical and psychological pain left many perplexed: Aren’t they totally different? (…)
Dr. Eisenberger studies the similarities in the way that the brain processes physical pain and the “social pain” that results from rejection.
She said she had repeatedly found that “people who are more sensitive to physical pain are more upset by rejection.” (…)
Adam Woo, a consultant in pain and anesthesia at King’s College Hospital in London, has worked with thousands of patients dealing with pain.
Patients with high levels of anxiety tend to be more sensitive to pain, he has found. “If you have anxiety, it makes your perception of pain worse,” he said.
And if two patients are facing the exact same kind of injury, the one with more anxiety tends to have a “higher complaint score,” he said.
Debra Kissen, executive director of Light on Anxiety, a treatment center in Chicago, believes that some people truly are just more sensitive — as in they seem to feel more intensely.
That said, she has observed the way that anxiety and physical pain can amplify each other.
Afflicted with chronic pain, a person may start to feel anxious that they have no control over their body.
Then their anxiety may increase their focus on the pain, exacerbating it. Treat either one and it will sometimes help both, she said.
What she finds most intriguing about the two kinds of pain is the consistency in her patients’ answers to a choice.
“I’ll ask someone, ‘You can either stub your toe and it hurts an eight, or feel emotional despair,’” she said. Patients always pick the toe.”
Wish the Notes feature worked on this one, because I wonder how many of us would answer Me Too.
The more stressed I am, the more sensitive I am to pain. The higher my pain levels, the worse my anxiety.
Same’s true for the other direction: The more relaxed, the easier it is to endure pain. The lower my pain or anxiety, the easier it is to sleep and function.
hmmm…
This is tangled for me. The less safe I feel, the more likely I am to *ignore* or *withhold* pain. My sensitivity to pain is secondary compared to my willingness to admit it, to the point where I have to be on the alert (or have loved ones alert me) to things like clumsiness, forgetfulness, or misdirected rage.
Good point: I lose awareness of pain and suffering the worse things get.
So, yeah.
She said she had repeatedly found that “people who are more sensitive to physical pain are more upset by rejection.” (…)
This is a known thing in ADHD, and why we experience RSD (rejection pain) so strongly that it has its own name. Pain is pain, the brain doesn’t really know the difference. Which is her whole area of study, really.
It also overlaps with fibromyalgia and ME; part of those conditions are the brain being overly sensitive to fatigue/pain signals (either the brain amplifying, or a genuinely higher intensity from higher nerve density). Muscle fatigue signals turn into muscle pain through intensity. Sometimes I take a painkiller so I stop feeling physically fatigued.
Anxiety in me is usually a symptom of either pain avoidance (i.e. a learned behavioural response), or just my brain being too overloaded/low on energy to cope and just sputtering out anxiety signals instead. If I rest/eat/drink/take painkillers it just goes away on its own. But it’s always a ‘something is physically wrong’ signal.
Hardcoding that into my brain means that now I stop and wonder why I’m feeling something, but when your brain is flipping into survival mode, one of the things it tends to do is just... take away the ability to sit back and critically consider your overall health right now. You just focus on the things you can do, and put the rest aside, and only later look back and realise you were hurting and that’s where all your resources went.
