Sometimes, my clients come into my clinic and pretend they’re not in pain. A lot of times, those same clients have had a loved one (or even a doctor!) tell them, “Oh, your pain is just in your head.”
But I have news for you: Every type of pain exists in your head. It just makes sense, if you really think about it. The brain is command central of the nervous system—so how else would we be able to register it? But that doesn’t mean that pain is fictional. Emotional pain, physical pain, intense pain, chronic pain—all pain, every pain—is real. And sometimes your brain has trouble telling the difference between a pain in your hand and a pain "in your head."
When it comes to pain, there is a major mind-body connection—and I see it at work in my clinic every day. Consider the following:
1. People who have rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia are three times more likely to have been abused than people without those conditions.
2. Up to 80 percent of amputees still experience “phantom pain” in their missing limbs.
3. Taking painkillers (such as Tylenol or Advil) diminishes emotional pain, and taking anti-depressants reduces physical pain.
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What’s more, a University of Colorado lab recently used fMRIs (a procedure using MRI technology to measure brain activity) to show that all humans have specific neurological pain “signatures” in the brain that are close to universal. Up until now, we’ve had no lab tests to prove we felt pain—our doctors just had to trust our subjective descriptions. (Hence, all that uncompassionate “it’s all in your head” nonsense you may have heard from others.) But their research also showed something even more empowering: We have another, separate brain connection that interprets our perception and sensation of that pain. In fact, researchers found that the people in the study could increase or decrease the activity of this system and, thereby, increase or decrease their perception of the pain. Pretty cool, right?
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While this research may be new, our neural hardware certainly isn’t. We may not have had fMRI studies to prove how the mind-body connection works with pain, but humans have been using an effective tool to tap into our innate pain-relieving system for millennia: meditation.
A recent meta-analysis of 47 studies and more than 3,500 subjects in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that meditation has been definitively proven to decrease pain. One Wake Forest University study found that just four 20-minute sessions of meditation training reduced pain intensity by 40 percent. (Compare that with morphine, which reduces pain by about 25 percent.) Another study found that nine mindfulness meditation classes reduced the severity of women’s IBS symptoms by 38 percent (versus 11 percent for those who just belonged to a support group). Long-term meditators enjoy even more pronounced pain-relieving powers, probably due to the increased gray matter and thickness of their cortex.
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Even if your pain is “all in your head,” does that make it any less valid, any less worthy of finding relief? No. But armed with this knowledge, we can help equip ourselves to better manage our own pain.
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Vicky Vlachonis, the author of The Body Doesn’t Lie, is a European osteopath and wellness consultant in private practice in Beverly Hills, integrating a variety of Eastern and Western treatment modalities to help her patients release their physical, emotional, and mental pain.
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