Pain as a Messenger

by John Maguire

Since our nervous system is organized to avoid pain at all cost and move towards pleasure, our impulse is to do whatever we can to eliminate pain as quickly as possible. But even though pain is unwanted, in most cases it is actually a friend, because it indicates something is wrong or out of balance in your body. It is a message from your nervous system to warn you that you need to take some action, or avoid certain actions, to bring your body back into balance. Pain resulting from an injury, for example, is one of the ways your body protects damaged tissue from being further injured from use. A headache may be the result of low blood sugar from not eating, and therefore is a message for you to eat something.

Most of us have been taught that pain is an enemy to be killed as quickly as possible, without first listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us. After all, TV advertisers spends millions of dollars trying to convince us our stomach distress means we have an Alka-Seltzer or Pepcid deficiency, instead of having us realize that it’s our nervous system’s way of saying, Stop overeating or eating unhealthy food! If your postal carrier delivered a message from the bank saying your account is overdrawn and if you don’t make a deposit soon they are going to repossess your car, would you kill him because you didn’t like the news? Or would you hurry to the bank to make a deposit? Killing the messenger won’t do us any good in the long run. Instead, we need to remedy the underlying problem, thereby eliminating the need for the message of pain.

The key, then, is to learn how to listen to your body in order to understand the message that pain is trying to convey and respond appropriately to eliminate the cause of the pain. In some cases the appropriate action may be to consult a health professional. In most cases, however, we can use a few simple techniques to alleviate our pain or discomfort and bring our bodies back into balance.