The concept of being addicted to pain might sound strange, but it’s grounded in how the nervous system works. When pain becomes a habitual experience, the neural pathways that carry pain signals are reinforced, much like how habits are formed through repetition. Over time, this can lead to a situation where, even after healing from an injury, individuals continue to experience pain because their brains are so accustomed to the sensation.
Some people can go for a walk and feel, “Oh, man, my ankle hurts, my balance I was struggling with, my hip hurts. Ah, maybe I should go to a surgeon and have them take a look at my knees and my hips.”
Well, fine. And, you know, a doctor might find something wrong with your hips and knees.
Years ago, when people had pain from their backs, right, they had a back problem. And the back problem means it hurt. And it hurt in a variety of ways. You know, bending down, picking something up, getting up out of a chair, a lot of things.
So with this problem, they began to go, “Well, what can I do about this except go to the doctor?”
And the doctor takes, let's say, an MRI and an x-ray. They look at the spine, and they go, “Well, you're fine. There's nothing wrong with your spine. We can't find anything. It looks perfect. You're lucky. The cartilage is intact. Nothing's slipped too much in your vertebra. Sorry, sir, but let's send you to physical therapy to do some exercises.”
Okay. But here's an interesting thing about nociceptors.
Now, that person, however, might have had a severe pain when they went to the doctor and got this information.
However, somebody else might get in a car accident, and it is terrible. And they got serious damage to their spine. Their back is hurting for a very good reason. Muscles are pulling hard to hold the bones together. And they get out of their car. The police have to help them out, get them into an ambulance, go off to the hospital.
And you'd wonder what the doctors would find.
Well, sometimes nothing.
They go to the hospital and they're in the same condition as the other person. This time, doctors can see damage of all kinds that's revealed in the x-rays and the MRIs and tests that might be run for them.
But actually, they're the kind of person to whom they become inured to their pain. They just don't pay attention to it much. And in fact, they heal very quickly and the pain goes away even sooner.
Discrepencies between these two examples led researchers to start thinking of pain in a different way.
The different experiences of pain can occur because the brain has formed what is often called an attractor well—a concept used to describe how certain patterns, including pain, can become deeply ingrained habits and difficult to break free from.
I get a lot of clients complaining that they just get out of bed in the morning and felt, “Oh, man, I must have been sleeping funny. My neck is killing me or my back is hurting me.” But maybe, their nociceptors are firing as they habitually do.
In an interview you find this out, that these kinds of things happen to this person throughout their life, and quite often. And you have to look at it as the nociceptors falling into what's called an attractor well.
An attractor well is a term, if you could think of a rock rolling along the ground, or a ball rolling around the ground. And somewhere in the ground, there's a well, a hole in the ground. And that ball heads for that well. And what's it going to do? It's going to roll into the well. It's not going to keep going over it. So it falls into the well. Now, how do you get the ball out of the well, you see?
That would be a question like, well, how do you have a solution for your pain? What do you need to learn? What do you need to feel or change so your nociceptors aren't screaming at you?
So, okay, you might find you've done something or other and you feel better. That means the ball would be out of the attractor well.
But whenever you roll that ball, it's going to probably go to the lowest point, and it's going to roll by itself easiest downhill a little bit. It doesn't have to be much, and it'll roll faster and faster and fall back into the well.
All of us have attractor wells.
Some of us have a shallow attractor well, and in fact, things don't stick, meaning, “Wow, that hurt. I remember when that really hurt. But actually, it's not bothering me anymore.”
Somebody else may have had a very mild strain, but it keeps hurting as a mild strain for 20 years, and some people even longer.
So that somebody whose attractor well is creating the habit of pulling the person's self, if you will, into pain.
All of this is part of what's called the neural matrix, meaning the matrix of varied possible ways that your brain organizes basic information about our body to us, like, “Ouch, that hurt. I shouldn't be touching a flame.” Or, “Ow, my knee hit something hard. Damn it.”
Or, “Oh, if I just avoid stepping a certain way, I stop hurting. Ah, I can walk now without a back pain. Great. What am I doing differently so I can learn from that and so I don't have to go to the doctor and I don't need any specialized treatment? Instead, I need to change the way in which I organize the pleasure and pain wells that are all part of what's called the attractor wells.”
In other words, some people, unconsciously, are attracted to pain. And it's a wicked problem.
Pain habits are devious. They're difficult.
To reorganize your painful sensory habits, it’s helpful to work with a professional one-on-one, but one approach to get started is to return to the exploratory movement of your youth.
Check out Dr. Wildman’s video programs— Change Your Age, Embodied Balance, and Active Sitting— and books Change Your Age and The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement.
For example, to move at all as a child, as an infant and a young child, you had to perform repeated movements again and again and again until you felt what you needed to do to, let's say, get your legs working and your trunk working so you could stand up, that kind of thing.
Now, you may think, what's the attractor well there? There are people who at the age of even 40, 45, look at the floor and go, “Oh, man, once I get on that floor, I don't know how I'm going to get up again without strain. It hurts so much. My back hurts. My knees hurt.” My whatever. Anything can hurt.
And that's a person for whom the floor becomes something like an attractor well. It pulls them in, and they go back to childhood. And it's like, “Uh-oh, I don't know what to do. I can't get up.”
Children cry over a lot of things. They fall down. They hurt themselves. They cry. However, I've never seen a kid, I've never heard of a child who cried because they learned to stand up.
