Suppose line A is your baseline where there is no pain, everything is hunky dory, and line B is your pain threshold, beyond which you feel pain.
In many cases, or at least initially anyway, when we get a “hit”, we get to the point beyond our pain threshold where we feel pain. After a while, when things heal and get better, most of the time we get back down to our baseline of “no pain”. Usually this does not take too long. This is (a) in the picture below.
“Hits” may be physical, as in the form of an injury, accident, disease. They may also be emotional or psychological, as in trouble in relationships, or stress, anxiety, anger, depression, although, the last few may also feed into the whole pain loop in a vicious cycle.
Over time, as we get more hits, we may not come all the way back to our “no pain” baseline (b), such that when we get hit the next time, it takes less of a hit to get us beyond our threshold (c). Then we might get a really big hit that takes us a long time to recover from (d), only we don’t really fully recover. We might be painfree, but we may be emotionally more fragile, for example.
The next time we get a hit, it may put us over the threshold and then keep us there (e), such that it would take just a tiny hit and we feel pain (f), or, we are in constant (chronic) pain.
Having said that, however, not everybody stays in the chronic pain zone. We will talk more about what keeps some people there in the next post.
It’s like our body accumulates pain (hits).
“Hits” may be physical, as in the form of an injury, accident, disease. They may also be emotional or psychological, as in trouble in relationships, or stress, anxiety, anger, depression, although, the last few may also feed into the whole pain loop in a vicious cycle.
Over time, as we get more hits, we may not come all the way back to our “no pain” baseline (b), such that when we get hit the next time, it takes less of a hit to get us beyond our threshold (c). Then we might get a really big hit that takes us a long time to recover from (d), only we don’t really fully recover. We might be painfree, but we may be emotionally more fragile, for example.
The next time we get a hit, it may put us over the threshold and then keep us there (e), such that it would take just a tiny hit and we feel pain (f), or, we are in constant (chronic) pain.
Having said that, however, not everybody stays in the chronic pain zone. We will talk more about what keeps some people there in the next post.
It’s like our body accumulates pain (hits).
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