The Undefeated Mind by Alex Lickerman & MD

Author:Alex Lickerman & MD [Lickerman, Alex & MD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefeated, self, mind, Self-help, indestructible
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

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Pain

No matter how much strength our willingness to stand alone may grant us, life is always able to assault us with measures of pain, both physical and emotional, that make us feel weak. Indeed, rather than thinking of resilience as the capacity to endure adversity, we might think of it more accurately as the capacity to endure the pain adversity causes.

Pain is a fascinating phenomenon. The way the brain registers physical pain, for instance, is not only complex but counterintuitive. Though the pain of a stubbed toe or a headache may seem like a single, unified experience, it actually represents the sum of two different experiences created by two separate areas of the brain—one called the posterior insula, which registers the sensation of pain (its quality, intensity, and so on) and the other the anterior cingulate cortex, which registers pain’s unpleasant character. We know this is how the brain experiences pain because of imaging studies and because patients who’ve had damage to the anterior cingulate cortex feel the sensation of pain but not its unpleasantness.1 That is, they feel pain but aren’t bothered by it (interestingly, in some people, morphine has the same effect2). When the anterior cingulate cortex isn’t functioning, pain is still experienced but seems to lose its emotional impact and thus its motivating force.

This finding, that the sensation of pain and the unpleasantness of pain come from distinct neurological processes that occur in different locations within the brain, explains how a single pain stimulus can cause such subjectively different pain experiences. Even if the physical sensation of pain remains constant, our “affective reaction” to it—how much it makes us suffer—will vary tremendously depending on several factors.

Research shows, for example, that how we interpret the meaning of pain has a dramatic impact on our ability to tolerate it. In one study, subjects reported pain they believed represented tissue damage to be more intense than pain they believed didn’t,3 possibly explaining why women rate cancer pain as more unpleasant than labor pain even when their intensities are the same.4 Not only that, but when we focus on the benefit of pain (when one exists), we’re actually able to reduce its unpleasantness. Another study showed that women in labor who focused primarily on their impending delivery rated the unpleasantness of their pain half that felt by women who focused primarily on their pain.5 This seems to be true even when pain represents both benefit and harm, as anesthesiologist Henry Beecher found during World War II when he observed that 75 percent of soldiers with severe battlefield injuries—broken bones and torn limbs—reported experiencing only minor pain (even going so far as to decline morphine) because of what their injuries signified: they were going home.6

Studies have further shown that expecting pain to be severe worsens our experience of it, and expecting it to be mild improves it.7 Further, being psychologically braced for pain also lessens its unpleasantness. This is true regardless of its cause, whether it’s from a medical procedure done for

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