Pain rewires your brain

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]All you chronic pain sufferers out there, casual reminder about your autonomic nervous system. Remember, it's that branch of your nervous system under involuntary control. So, it just does its job. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to do anything. And that's great, but it's largely controlled by your emotions. So, you can either be in a sympathetic state, which is your fight or flight, or a parasympathetic state. That's your rest and digest. Ultimately, what they mean is you're in either in a state of survival or healing. And you cannot simultaneously be in both.

[00:00:37]When you're in a constant sympathetic state, not only are you taking resources away from your body's ability to heal, you're activating the periaqueductal gray region of your brain, which is just one of the 44 different regions of your brain associated with pain processing.

[00:00:59]Specifically, the periaqueductal gray is involved in modulating pain.

[00:01:04]It's involved in balancing your autonomic nervous system. So, now we've actually created this bidirectional relationship where sympathetic activation influences your periaqueductal gray, which then reinforces the sympathetic nervous system, creating more pain, reinforcing fear, and interfering with vocalization. This is actually one of the many reasons why describing chronic pain is so difficult. It's not that you just have a lack of words for it. It's that your brain literally is not allowing you to vocalize how you're experiencing your chronic pain.