Where (and why) does it hurt?
After more than 14 years, my family is well aware that, when my pain is bad, I’m bad. I’m no fun, I snap at everything, and I cry a lot. Where does all this emotion come from, and what has it got to do with pain?
Some of this is self-pity (God I’m so tired of this), some is exhaustion (God I just want to lie here and not move), and some is pure emotion, and it spills over into my every day life. I weep when I see those bank commercials where a school in an underserved neighborhood is being painted in bright colors by a team of smiling volunteers, or where a child is helping an old man plant a vegetable garden. I sniffle when my son talks about sending out college applications. But most often I don’t need any new reasons. I just curl up and cry.
The pain/emotion thing forms a sort of vicious cycle. When you hurt, your body wants to react in ways that will ease the pain. In my case, when my neck is aching, my shoulders pull up and tighten to “guard” the sources of my pain. The tighter muscles begin to ache, and finally, the emotions tied up in hopelessness and tension and pain come out.
There is a partial explanation for this, and it makes me feel partially better to know that. When your finger touches a flame, the peripheral nerves in the outer layer of skin ignite like the spark in a car’s starter. These nerves shoot their message, like “Ouch!,” or “Drat!” along the spinal cord and up to the thalamus in the brain, which can be compared to the switchboard room in “Mad Men” where millions of messages are sorted and sent off to the right department (or area of the brain) for processing.
In cases where the risk is small, you may not notice any pain until later, maybe until you are in bed relaxing and the brain has had time to work through its entire “to do” list.
So where does the “hurt” actually happen? If my nervous system were to fail, would I fail to suffer? If a tree falls in my neck, what would actually feel the crash? Pain happens in the brain, and provides a warning that something is wrong or broken, or that a flame is hot and must be avoided.
Special gatekeepers filter pain messages from the body and determine if they are serious enough to involve the brain’s intervention. Messages relating to pain are triaged by three different regions of the brain: the somatosensory cortex that locates the pain; the frontal cortex that tells you what caused the pain and what to do; and one final place called the limbic system, which coincidentally also relays emotions like sadness or joy or panic to the rest of the brain.
Even thinking about this pain cycle is painful. Why does the pain alarm need to sound continually? Why can’t my brain issue an intermittent warning to tell me I need medical care like my microwave does when the food is done cooking?
There are some steps that can be taken to ease the pain that our brains process every day. In fact, there are dozens of things to try. I’ve tried many options, and I’ll share my experiences with you. More to come on this next time.
