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Brain Pain: How Central Sensitization Creates Chronic Pain
- Rhiannon Seymone
- Oct 13, 2017
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Pain, especially chronic pain, is complex, consisting of environmental, social, physiological, psychological and energetic components. All of these elements are juggled by our nervous systems, emphasized and de-emphasized according to inner resource availability and unconscious priority in an effort to prevent [further] harm. However, sometimes the body can be overzealous in its guardian duties. One example of this overactivation is called central sensitization.
Central sensitization is defined as changes in the brain and spinal cord that create a heightened reactivity to noxious or potentially noxious stimuli. In other words, your brain turns its pain perception up to eleven (because eleven is more) making painful sensations feel more painful than usual and, in extreme cases, perceiving innocuous touch as threatening. This mechanism is thought to contribute largely to chronic pain. Because every incident of pain puts your nervous system on higher alert requiring increasingly smaller sensations to set off pain, a person whose central nervous system has entered this loop will feel more pain with less prompting over time.
Evidence that suggests central sensitization is always reversible. How long it takes to break this cycle depends on 1) how advanced the condition is and 2) how well we can create safety in the body. Creating safety involves demonstrating to the central nervous system that the danger has passed and working the pain perception dial back down to a reasonable level. The process will go much more smoothly in the therapeutic environment created by a physical therapist, occupational therapist, or bodyworker who understands the importance of working with both the conscious mind (via the stories we cultivate around our pain) and the unconscious mind (all of the organizational processes and energetics of the body).
Further reading on this subject can be found here:
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