All pain comes from your brain

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Your tissues on their own cannot make pain; there are no pain nerve fibers or pain receptors anywhere in your body. Instead, information from your tissues gets sent to your brain, which takes into account everything else it is aware of—your thoughts and beliefs, your surroundings, your memories, your other sense perceptions, your mood—to determine whether your body is in danger. If it decides the body is in danger, the brain then creates pain, telling you take action to keep your body safe. 

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Among other things, this means that:

• Your brain can "get it wrong," weighing non-corporeal stimuli so highly that it creates real physical pain even in the absence of danger signals from your tissues.

• A belief that your body is damaged can itself create pain, even in a healthy body. 

• Anything can be "wrong" with your body—misaligned, out of place, degenerated—and as long as your brain doesn't perceive it as a threat, it won't cause pain.

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Many know this can happen in the immune system, which is designed to fight off pathogenic microbes but can make mistakes, instead fighting against your own tissues (autoimmunity) or harmless things in your environment, like cat hair or pollen (allergies).

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But fewer know that your pain system can mis-activate in a similar way, perceiving safe signals from your tissues as harmful and labelling those safe sensations as pain. This condition goes by many names: chronic pain, tension myoneural syndrome (TMS), neuroplastic pain, amplified pain syndrome (AMPS), central sensitization, fibromyalgia, as well as dozens of other names that are more body-part specific (like migraines). It can also include other symptoms your brain uses to protect you, such as nausea, fatigue, vertigo, itching, insomnia, coughing, depersonalization, brain fog, and digestive issues.

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The good news is that by changing the way your brain views your pain (and your life), you can change the pain itself. Thousands of people have used this approach to free themselves from chronic pain without drugs or invasive procedures, and you can too. 

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