By Dr. Zachary LaVigne, B.S., D.C.
Pain has a branding problem.
We treat it like a villain, something to defeat, eliminate, or silence as fast as possible. A headache means you failed. Back pain means something is wrong with you. Knee pain means you’re broken, aging, or doing life incorrectly. The goal becomes quiet at any cost.
Biologically, that framing doesn’t hold up.
Pain evolved as a communication system. It exists to get your attention, not to punish you. Long before scans, specialists, and pain scales, pain was how the body said slow down, change course, or protect this area for a while. It’s information, not a verdict.
Modern culture struggles with that idea because we’ve trained ourselves to interpret pain morally. If you hurt, you must have done something wrong. Sat too much. Exercised incorrectly. Slept the wrong way. Didn’t stretch. Didn’t foam roll. Didn’t hydrate. Pain becomes evidence of personal failure instead of feedback from a living system.
That mindset creates urgency and panic. It pushes people to shut the signal off before understanding what triggered it.
Historically, pain wasn’t meant to be erased immediately. It was meant to be interpreted. Is this pain sharp or dull? Sudden or gradual? Local or spreading? Does it change with rest, movement, heat, cold, or time? Those questions matter because pain rarely appears at random. It reflects load, recovery, stress, and perception interacting in real time.
The nervous system sits at the center of this process. Pain is not produced in tissues alone. It’s generated by the brain based on incoming sensory information and perceived threat. That means pain can increase even when tissues are relatively healthy, and it can decrease even when structural changes are present. This doesn’t make pain imaginary. It makes it adaptive.
Modern life complicates this relationship. We live in bodies that are overstimulated and under-recovered. Poor sleep, constant cognitive demand, financial pressure, social stress, and nonstop digital input raise baseline threat levels in the nervous system. When that baseline is high, the body becomes more protective. Muscles guard more easily. Joints feel tighter. Sensations register faster and louder.
In that state, pain shows up sooner and sticks around longer. Not because the body is fragile, but because it’s cautious.
The problem is how we respond. We’re taught to override signals instead of interpreting them. Numb it. Push through it. Ignore it until it forces your hand. That strategy makes sense in emergencies. It falls apart as a long-term approach.
Silencing pain without listening often keeps the underlying pattern intact. The body adapts by bracing, compensating, or avoiding movement altogether. Over time, those adaptations harden into habits. Pain then feels chronic, confusing, and unpredictable, reinforcing the belief that something is fundamentally wrong.
A more useful question than “How do I get rid of this pain?” is “What is this pain responding to?”
That shift invites curiosity instead of fear. It creates space to notice patterns, loads, stressors, and recovery gaps. When the nervous system feels safer, pain often turns the volume down on its own.
Pain isn’t a moral failure. It’s feedback from a system trying to protect you with the information it has.
When we listen instead of panicking, pain stops being an enemy and starts becoming a guide.