Pain is Like Thirst

A client asked me the other day why she recently began having pain in her legs again after several months of being painfree. In spite of my efforts at education, pain remained for her a signal that something was "broken" and being painfree meant it had been fixed. Now, apparently, something had gone wrong and she wondered why the "fix" had not held. After all, nothing had really happened that would have caused this injury. So why the pain?

As uncomfortable as it may be, it is important to realize that pain is a normal biological experience. It is one way our nervous system communicates information about the outside world or our inner happenings. It often begins as a low rumble and, when ignored, builds to a deafening roar. Even if not ignored, responses are frequently unhelpful and generally end up making the problem worse. We need to learn the language that is being spoken.

When my four year old son says he's "starving" or that he's "dying of thirst" I know (even if he does not) that he's demonstrating his flair for the dramatic and that there's actually no threat of him becoming too hungry or in desperate need of a glass of water. We are very fortunate to have our basic needs met with relative ease and rarely become distressed by these normal biological signals. But let's look at how these "sensations" work and what this has to do with pain.

Our brains constantly monitor what is happening in our internal and external environments. For instance, when blood volume decreases beyond a certain point, the brain detects this change and recognizes a need state. In order to drive the system back toward balance, thirst is produced as an output of the brain to motivate us to drink. In this sense, pain is very similar to thirst. When the brain receives increased inputs from certain nerve fibers, it may produce pain as a means of producing a particular response. The helpful response depends on the context of the signalling and the required behavioral change. In most cases, we're looking for a movement.

And so, I asked my client if she ever became thirsty after working out in her garden in the hot sun. She replied affirmatively and I asked if that meant there was something wrong with her or if her body was simply reacting as it should given the circumstances. Again, she agreed that thirst was normal, even helpful, in this context. Likewise with pain. If you are not giving your body the movement it requires when it requires it, pain is the natural result and the right kind of motion will help you resolve it.