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It is no secret that at least from what I write, I experience a fair amount of pain. It is unlikely to be the worst pain anyone has experienced, nor is it the most constant pain, as there are some times of respite, all be them short. Still, pain is always a personal experience that is hard to compare with others, even when the conditions appear near identical. This is why two people can eat a spicy meal and have two very different views of the experience. 

> All of our experience is incomparable to others.  

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![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23ywkYv6kVnPsJpddWfhnuYGU9AXFqpGPwPhnJNd3euRP8osiaGdJgKD6q4CtMazum7RV.png)


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> But we do compare. 

My relationship with pain is a love-hate situation, where there are times that I love the feeling and times that it feels like it is crushing me. Yet, the difference between the two seems to work along the lines of the meaning of the pain, or the purpose of the experience. For instance, going to the gym and pushing a heavy weight to the limit of my body can be painful, but I experience it as a good feeling. Whereas the pain I have had for example from pancreatitis when I was young, was a terrible experience. One is a position of growth, one of suffering. 

It seems today that a lot of what we experience as pain is seen as suffering, as if pain shouldn't be part of our daily experience. Yet, if you look at the oldest cultures in the world and how they handle pain, they divorce pain from suffering, seeing one of the body, the other of the mind. We seem to forget this though, because the same wiring is responsible for both, meaning that in order to tease the two apart, we would first have to engage our mind to differentiate which is "just pain" and which is "suffering". 

> Is it doing us harm? 

I often use the visualisation when considering fear, of standing on the edge of a cliff with the risk of falling off, and standing on the edge of a stage with thousands of expectant people waiting for a speech. The fear network and experience could be equally engaged for both, but only one of them has a physical risk involved, while the other has a psychological risk only. The reaction of the body can be the same however, with beating heart and sweaty palms, racing mind, and high discomfort. 

> A child fears an imaginary monster under the bed.

*And the body responds.*

Pain is similar in many ways, because our body doesn't automatically differentiate between good pain, and bad pain - growth and suffering. Instead, it defaults to *all pain is bad pain* because that is what the brain has learned is going to give the best chance of survival. But in a world where we don't usually face existential acute threats daily like we did in the past, we have become unaccustomed to the levels of pain tolerance we likely once had, and instead err on the side of caution, when there is no reason to be cautious. 

On top of this, we have also increasingly conditioned our mind to value pleasure, overusing our reward centres to the point that we expect we should always feel good, and if we don't, then something is wrong with us. This is not the case - life is full of pain. Always was, always will be, and the irony is that the more we try to avoid the pain, the more painful life becomes. A person who takes painkillers to lessen their pain, will lower their tolerance to pain over time and they will become more sensitive and take the pill a little earlier. This is the same for the people who avoid social discomfort too, or expect to only hear the things that they want to hear, in the way they want to hear them.

As said, my relationship with pain is contradictory, because I clearly experience both good and bad pain, sometimes simultaneously. I can push myself in a painful growth situation, whilst concurrently experiencing suffering pain from a different condition. The thing that helps me through, is differentiating the experiences as two separate events, choosing to put my resources into growth over suffering. The pain from the suffering doesn't stop, but it is also not nearly as unsufferable. Instead, I am able to increase the energy expenditure on the growth side, because I can am able to remove the cost on the suffering side. 

> Resources where they are best needed.

Just think how much would be possible if we could all allocate our personal mental, physical and emotional resources to where they are most valuable. Instead of spending time worrying about or experiencing the fear of embarrassment, we could just act and do, learning from the experience, trying again, improving. Instead of holding ourselves back because the emotional pain we feel from disappointment, we could recalibrate and send our resources into building better, engaging again, discovering new. 

> Pain is a guide.

A guide may be a suggestion, but it doesn't mean it is the correct or only way forward. If the guide is confused by the situation, unable to appropriately evaluate and formulate  the experience, it is going to recommend actions that might be counter to where we want to go, and what we want to achieve. I believe that a lot of our human sensors are out of calibration today, because we have fed ourselves and conditioned ourselves on a host of alternatives, choices and substitutes, that have weakened our ability to accurately decision make. Not only this, these alternatives, like fast food, are easier to obtain, feel better in the moment, and are far more convenient to use.  

> But they all carry a future cost.

The future cost of always trying to feel good by constantly managing for the level of pain rather than the type of pain, means to reduce the threshold to feeling bad. This sets up a cyclical relationship of pain relief that requires more relief from lower rates of pain, in the same way a drug addict needs more of a drug to get an equivalent high, but the high doesn't last as long. 

Of course, I am no expert in dealing with pain or what it even is, I am just a student of it through my own experiences and observations, as well as the tips and tricks I have picked up or developed along the way. What I have come to accept though is that I am never going to be pain free, until my life ends, so that means in order to have a higher quality of experience and increased wellbeing, acting *with pain* is the only way forward. Doing what I need to do, rather than what I am told to do by what are often, misfiring signals in my brain. 

What I think we should all realise though, is that pain is not incompatible with joy. We are still able to experience joy, even when we are hurting the most, whether that be physical or psychological pain. Often though, joy is coupled with the shared experience of doing something meaningful with people we care for. So to live a better life, we needn't keep searching for pain relief, but increase the meaningful experiences we have with others, doing something that aids our growth. 

Even if painful.

 




Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]


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