Live Whole Health #265: Calming the body’s alarm system 

Modern pain researchers agree that the purpose of pain is protection, not damage detection. Pain is like an alarm system that goes off when danger is detected. Our brains use all the information available to alert us of danger and then signal pain to protect us. Consider this example: Our hand touches a hot stove; the brain signals danger and we immediately yank our hand away.

While pain offers a protective buffer to help prevent injury, if it persists, this buffer can become overprotective, and pain is produced even when there is no real potential for harm to the body. Our alarm system becomes oversensitive and overprotective. 

Like an oversensitive fire alarm 

We want a fire alarm to go off when there’s a fire, but we don’t want it to go off when we’re making popcorn. Imagine a fire alarm that is always blaring when we don’t need it. That can be annoying at first, but if it continues blaring, it can get in the way of our daily life.  

Similarly, chronic and persistent pain is our body’s alarm system becoming oversensitive and going off all the time, even when there is no actual danger. Persistent pain is defined as pain that lasts more than three months, even after the original injury or condition has healed. In other words, there is no injury or harm (danger) happening, yet the alarm never readjusts back to its normal sensitivity ̶  this is the brain continuing to produce pain when there is no real danger to the body.  

To be clear, all pain is real, including persistent pain, and these pain symptoms have real and harmful impacts on people’s lives. But when we understand how pain really works, we can find and develop effective strategies for working with it. Pain research tells us that the purpose of pain is protection—and in the case of persistent pain—the alarm system has learned to become oversensitive.

Resetting the alarm

The way out of this situation is to use strategies to reset the alarm system. We’re not getting rid of pain, because it’s an important protector. What we are doing is recalibrating the alarm system so that the brain is not producing pain all the time, especially in the absence of real danger. 

There are many effective approaches to help calm down and reset the alarm system, such as gentle movement, pain education, cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness. Mindfulness activates the relaxation response of our nervous system and is a wonderful tool to help calm down the oversensitive alarm system. It is easy to learn and only takes a few minutes to do. While all of these take some work, over time they can help the body learn that not all pain indicates damage. 

Give mindfulness a try by following along in this 13-minute Mindfulness for Chronic Pain video, guided by VA Social Worker Hang Ruan, LICSW, of VISN 20 Clinical Resource Hub. With ongoing practice, mindfulness helps calm down the alarm system by gradually resetting our brain and nervous system to produce a more accurate response to physical stress. When the alarm is no longer blaring all the time, we can get our life back, and have the space and energy to focus on things that are important to us.  

Learn more about mindful awareness and find additional tools to support your health and well-being.