Unfortunately, pain is guaranteed in life, be it physical or emotional. You might fall over, break a bone or touch a boiling hot pan while cooking. We all know the feeling, but what exactly is pain? In easy terms, it’s a sophisticated warning and lesson learning system. Touch a hot pan for a second and it stings. That’s a warning. Hold it for minutes, and it’ll hurt for days, reminding you that perhaps you should use an oven glove next time.
In this way, short lived or “acute” pain is a good thing, even though it might not feel like it. It teaches us what to avoid.
But how does pain actually work in our body? Just under our skin, there is a network of pain nerve fibers that are activated, and send the alarm up to our brain, which is where we feel pain. Pain, after all, is in the mind -- we can build up a tolerance to it the more we feel it. Hence, professional combat sports people can withstand a good deal more pain than the average human!
However, our pain receptor system can sometimes malfunction, and it’s this that can result in chronic or permanent pain. Believe it or not, one in five adults suffer from chronic pain, which lingers on long after our tissues have healed.
