The Psychophysiology of Pain: The less you try to suffer, the more you will suffer

B. The Pain Merchants and Pain Industry

Even though pain is the key to life, and is key to all the three key needs of life, ie survive, thrive, and reproduce, modern-day industries and solutions are built to eliminate pain from human life.

We build machines to reduce human effort and thus human pain. We build vehicles to reduce the pain of traveling to far places. Pension promise to reduce the pain of earning money after retirement. Insurance offers to relieve the pain of healthy when you get ill, as they promise to offer “better medical treatment.” Education and schooling offer to relieve the pain of living a difficult life to learn from life and acquire real knowledge, instead the degrees become proof of the knowledge.

Because the very meaning of life is pain, whenever a pain reliever or quick pain killer is offered, it is essentially a diversion from the current pain, and taking one towards another more tolerable pain. Today earning money is relatively easier. However, having a partner that you can spend your life is extremely hard. Therefore dating apps offer to solve your pain against money and you have no problem earning more.

Therefore, modern life is all about diverting focus from unacceptable pain to more acceptable pain.

Teeth pain? Extract.
Chest pain? Stent.
Headache? Nextdom.
Cancer? Chemo.
Insulin Resistance? Metformin.
Tension? Telma.
Partner pain? Housemaid and Thai Paro.
No child? Test tube.
Labor pain? C-section.

Massage, painkillers, antacids, surgery, insurance, loan, prostitution, counseling, drug, “Natural cure!”

C. Science of Pain

Pain is a nerve electrical signal carried by the nerves from any site of the body to the brain of an excessive amount of negatively charged atoms at one site of the body, causing high electrical activity.

Any site of the body where high chemical reactions take place will have higher electrical activity because, for any chemical reaction to take place, electrons must transit from one atom or bond to another.

Examples of Overactivity

If your phagocytes and lymphocytes attack anything and everything where they should have just relaxed:- Overactivity of autoimmunity.

You are hateful and envious. The heart has to supply more blood to the amygdala. Na+ is not enough, Ca++ is needed now. So calcium atoms of teeth are to be broken to close these neuropathways with microcalcification. Overactivity:-teeth pain.

Pain is a messenger

Hence, pain is not the problem, but is the greatest gift of life. A messenger designed to make you aware that there is an overactivity. The more overactivity, the more pain increases. This means there is more electrical charge difference in the brain.

Because living is equivalent to taking pain to survive, thrive, and reproduce, it is the pain signals that provide an awareness to the brain about “being alive.”

Therefore the experience of one pain simply means that something else is subsidized. Based on the type of pain, the brain prioritizes the healing. When you are pained due to a survival challenge(like job loss), the brain tries to solve that problem. But the pain merchants offer to solve that pain of yours. Because pain is consistent, when that pain is solved, some other pain increases. You’re not experiencing the pain doesn’t mean that the pain doesn’t exist. It simply means that there is no message of the pain.

Pain is Protector
Pain through GABA pathways shuts your brain, slowing it down, to slow the body to kill overactivity.

Pain is your Age
Because the faster body works, it has to run the metabolism that fasts. Each cycle of metabolism is a pendulum tick of the body’s circadian rhythm, embedded in each cell. So the higher the pain, the slower you age.

Pain is Emotion
Both Estrogen synthesis and receptors are activated by the vagus nerves of the body, which activate with pain. So, no pain, no emotions. Emotionally unstable individuals will always attract narcissists to cause pain to feel emotions.

Pain is healing
Because both GABA and GH are activated by vagal tone, which is activated by pain, the more pain you have the more you rest, and recover faster, and age slower.

D. Why Pain Relief is the villain of life?

Anything that shoots your pain is shooting the messenger and the body’s natural ways of dealing with excess electrons and overactivity. It is like there is a fire inside your home, and you close the door and sit outside. Wow, no fire!

E. The Downside of Pain Avoidance

Momentary feelings don’t matter in life. Pain is not an aberration, it is the need of the body and the brain. Pain is the off switch of the body. That is why the birth of life itself is one of the most painful experiences. If you avoid the pain, you lose the opportunity for the body to flood you with GH(Growth Hormone). It is the reason mothers with more labor pain remain young for longer.

The modern world has become a circus, where people want anything but the truth, because the truth is painful, and pain is the driver of life. Most of the acts and decision of modern society is centered around having less pain, reducing overall life.

Learn about your pain. It is an opportunity to learn yourself, connect to yourself, take a step back, and cherish life. And that absolutely doesn’t mean that you must jump into the well of pain and embrace cancer. You learn and slowly change your internal functioning. There is no escape. None.

Paradoxically, every gain is a pain in itself. The problem is the more one gets anything other than knowledge(which of course fills the otherwise empty cerebellum) the more pain to the brain.

Let us consider an example of Cancer, which is considered to be one of the most painful diseases, and see how cancer is not a curse, but rather an opportunity for one to heal.

Case Study of Cancer and Pain

When your metabolism speed crosses a threshold, the body can no longer meet that need. Carcinoma is nothing but the fastest metabolite. Metastasis is a program that runs through the overactive organs to extend your life. Read the message and do the needful, rather than killing the postman.

Everything one has needs to be cared for, protected, and grown. And our brain can not draw unlimited energy. Irrespective of what one uses or doesn’t the brain has to keep its thread alive. The more such threads, the more clusters(not cerebellum) in the cortex. The higher the number of clusters in the cortex, the lesser sleep brain gets as it has to keep the clusters active. As the sleep depletes, the brain tries to close the clusters with CaO. This microcalcification over a period of time leads to Hypertension.

Prolonged hypertension shuts down the reproductive system. When sperm density decreases in Semen, the prostrate enlargement begins as a compensatory mechanism. So, there is no escape.

Cancer is also a proliferation of tissues. If you try to put more potatoes in a bag, then obviously the bag will bulge and will have a higher chance of losing its handle and falling down due to overload. Cancer is the same, bulging of the tissues due to overload. So when you have such an overloaded bag, you are aware that the bag may get torn apart, and you slow down. The overloaded bag also feels heavy and causes pain in your arms. If this pain and the bulging were not present, then you would have carried the bag normally just to witness the torn bag and spilled potatoes.

So cancer helps you to slow down, become more careful with how much you load in your tissues and the brain, and handholds you towards recovery. When you reach home and unload the potatoes, the bag becomes normal, and you don’t have the cancer anymore. Importantly, now the bag is much weaker than it used to be, and so in the future, it will hold much fewer potatoes; in the future, the bag may get torn apart, and the handles may come out without any pain to your arms and bulging in the bag. That future is a more unwanted future, isn’t it?

Therefore when you don’t have any pain in any work or action, you are either not clocking the upper limit, or the body is not giving you any signal even when it is breaking down. Would you rather prefer a sudden collapse of the body(like the potato bag), or a tissue proliferation(like bulging in the bag) and pain in wrist?

F. Is pain subjective?

Pain when felt is not subjective. This is simply a charged atomic weight difference in any living cell/cluster/group of cells.

What is subjective is how much of the difference is the threshold for a brain to start worrying about the same. Again subjectivity is a quantified element and the ratio of pre-frontal cortex to Amygdala absolute electric potential+neuroplasticity differentials.

Mental pain is essentially emotional pain, which is essentially a point that is fearful(not threatening). Fear is a predictive mechanism of the brain. Any predictive neuropathways are weird from the 4th week of the pregnancy, or at least 8 months before anyone was born. So, how a brain perceives a situation as a potential threat to the future is beyond one’s control or training.

Fear is again processed in the subconscious. Avoidance is a mechanism of inhibiting the pathway from awareness to the subconscious, or cortex–x–medulla. Any neuro blockage is done by closing the path with CaO2. So, essentially pain avoidance will increase Ca++ in the body, raising blood pressure.

A calcium channel blocker will simply increase Na+Cl- breakup, to supply the needed charge, creating HCl and making the body Acidic. Avoid pain, get acidic or hypertensive.

G. Why Avoiding Suffering is Bigger Pain than the Pain Itself

Suffering is the feeling of pain. If one doesn’t feel, it simply means that there is a neuro blockage between the pain center and the aware brain. That simply means messages will try hard to find their path in the brain(like a traffic jam). This simply means anxiety, followed by an episode of depression, and thereafter, a permanent closure of emotional cognition.

So, choosing to “not suffer” is one of the pain strategies, primarily adopted for emotional trauma. The problem is this very strategy leads to secondary psychopathy, which first expresses as a mood disorder, then borderline personality disorder, then anxiety disorder, then Anemia, then hypoxia, then tissue necrosis, followed by a body bombarded with free ROS, followed by unmanageable inflammation of all the organs.

Suffering means emotional cognition is still working and intact. And not suffering is simply the first stage of permanent self-disassociation. Death is often more relaxing, comforting, and beautiful than self-disassociation syndrome, as the brain’s ability to identify itself as a living object diminishes.

Choice if any, is only to accept, become aware, learn, face, learn more, and solve, which of course is a prolonged process. 😊

H. Why do we learn more in pain?

Pain is the only teacher(scientifically), because Neuroplasticity is maximum under pain, and minimum while one is not suffering in pain. The problem of today’s education and healthcare is precisely that. There is no education when one is in pain(illness), and there is no health while one is going through education.

The brain doesn’t deal with information. The brain deals with context. There are only two contexts in the brain, rewards, and punishment(pain). There is no immediate reward in the education system. It is a possibility of a good future. This very phenomenon puts the brain into a “Hope” mode, rather than a reality mode. And when a brain is subjected to prolonged hope, it compensates with “Worry. (Fear of the unknown about the things that can go wrong)”

No one knows what to do with Ohm’s law, because no one has to use it in a day to day life, and thus brain doesn’t care. Put the brain for a long into things it doesn’t care and slowly the brain stops caring about you.

I. If pain is so good then how come everyone pursues to get rid of pain?

If we are to accept that pain is good, then acceptance of the pain must be natural to human beings, isn’t it? If pain was really good, then everyone would have loved pain and would never try to avoid pain, isn’t it? For example, hunger is normal and no one complains about hunger. So, if pain was normal, why would anyone complain about it in the first place?

Interestingly, hunger is also a pain. When you are hungry, your body has low energy. The body and the brain complain. You then accept this complaint and pain and acknowledge it. Childbirth is also painful, but mothers accept and acknowledge it because without this mothers can not give birth. So, we accept and acknowledge our pain when we know that there is a benefit associated with it.

Exercising is also painful. When you do weight training or do cardio like running, all the muscles lose quick energy and body pains. But you accept and acknowledge the pain because it will make you healthy.

When you go to work and work for 12 hours away from your family and children, that separation is a pain, traveling to work, and working for 12 hours daily is a pain. But you accept and acknowledge the pain, because there will be a salary at the end of the month.

A breakup appears painful because you feel rejected and there appear to be no positive gains in accepting this pain. So you try too hard to hold onto the relationships. If there is a breakup, it means that the relationship itself was painful. So you got relieved from investing in something that was causing pain and had no particular future prospect. Because if the future of the relationship was bright, both of you would have accepted the pain of being together and there wouldn’t be a breakup in the first place. So, not accepting the pain of the relationship led to the pain of the breakup. Not accepting the breakup then will again pull you back into the pain of the relationship, and you will remain stuck in life.

When you accept that the breakup is your opportunity to set free and explore a better future and not necessarily a rejection of you, then you will accept and acknowledge the breakup, and thus, even though there is pain, it will not concern you.

J. We try to avoid pain, deflect it, and deny it, due to fear of the consequences

When one fasts on a religious festival such as Ramadan, or Navratri even in those days you suffer from the hunger and pain of it. But you deny that you are hungry and avoid the sense of hunger because you are afraid of adverse consequences due to the wrath of God.

This is exactly what happens to us in every painful situation. We don’t accept a situation and pain out of it because in our brains we imagine a bad future consequence.

When a business is not running with profitability, you try to find a painkiller in Loans hoping that this painkiller will take you out of your pain. If you accept that indeed business is not running well, then you can look deeper into the business fundamentals and keep fixing them till you come out of the pain. A loan will give you temporary relief, but this also comes with the future pain of paying back your earning. As business fundamentals are wrong(which has led to the current want for a loan), the pain of poor business fundamentals, plus the pressure of repayment will accumulate in the future.

If you acknowledged the pain and remained in the pain, you would have given away several unwanted operations to reduce the burden and stay in the business. This would have continued till a point where you would become profitable. The reason you did not accept the pain due to business losses is due to the rigidity that you are not wrong, your decisions are not wrong.

More often or not we get surprised by a painful situation, not because the situation will not pass, but because that situation makes us feel that we made a mistake. When we feel we made a mistake, then our brain always wants to correct it. However, we can not go back to the past to correct our mistakes. So brain tricks us with several imaginary situations so that we can avoid the pain, and the lazy brain can avoid working hard towards correcting itself.

Some of the classic modern-day examples of unacceptance of pain and trying to deflect them

You see every escape from pain you seek, every denial, every avoidance of pain has an imaginary component to it. One tries to escape pain due to some hypothetical bad future and keep hope alive. This is fantasy, and this fantasy helps one to stay away from reality to experience less pain. But just because one is experiencing less pain at this moment due to their fantasy doesn’t mean that they have a good life, on the contrary, they have no life, as life itself is pain.

So when one goes for continuous education when one doesn’t get a job, the brain suffers from survival pain. When one leaves his/her love to satisfy people with a fear of not losing people, he/she loses the love, and thus brain suffers from reproduction pain.

When one seeks divorce, the brain suffers from invalidation of shared memories and emotions. A marriage not working is a pain, and divorce is another pain. One pain can not solve another pain. Rather one keeps hopping between the same pain, getting stuck in life.