Pain Tolerance Isn’t Built By Suffering More
People like to think of pain tolerance as something you can “train.” You take a bit of discomfort, you grit your teeth, you push through. Do that enough times and (voilà) you’re now a pain Jedi, and in the context of physical training, this might have some truth, but when you are injured and in pain, it doesn’t work this way.
The Trap of Endurance
When you repeatedly endure pain, especially without relief or resolution, you don’t become tougher. You often become more sensitive. The nervous system, being the adaptive organism it is, learns that the world is a dangerous place.
If you ignore pain long enough, your brain concludes, “This must be important.” The volume knob goes up, not down.
This is why chronic pain often starts as something small, a tweak, an ache, a niggle and ends up as a constant companion. Not because the tissue damage got worse (the disc doesn’t get more bulged), but because the nervous system got better at producing pain in response to a situation which has felt threatening for way too long.
Central Sensitisation in Plain English
At the heart of this process is a process called central sensitisation. It’s the nervous system’s version of being on too much caffeine.
In a healthy system, pain is a useful alarm. It rings when there’s a threat and quiets down when the threat passes. In a sensitised system, the alarm starts ringing when someone just walks past the house.
Here’s what’s going on under the hood:
Spinal neurons that process danger signals become more excitable. They start firing more easily.
Inhibitory systems — the ones that dampen the signal — get a little lazy.
The brain, always eager to make sense of chaos, starts predicting pain even before the body sends much evidence.
The result is a nervous system that’s doing its job too well. It’s like a smoke detector that goes off every time you make toast.
Why “Pushing Through” Can Backfire
So, when you push through pain thinking you’re toughening up, you might actually be teaching your brain to overreact.
Every repetition of “this hurts but I’ll ignore it” reinforces the danger association. The nervous system learns that pain equals threat, and threat equals attention. Over time, it takes less and less stimulus to cause the same pain.
It’s not a weakness; it’s part of our evolutionary make-up to ensure survival, and your brain is just trying to protect you. Unfortunately, it’s overdoing it.
The Smarter Kind of Toughness
Real resilience isn’t about ignoring pain. It’s about listening to it without catastrophizing. It’s learning when to rest, when to move, and when to breathe.
It’s about giving your nervous system evidence that it’s safe again, that movement isn’t dangerous.
This is why people often improve not by toughening up, but by calming down and by moving in ways that the brain expects to be painful but provides a positive experience with movement. A good example of this is my Hip Hinge series for people who are struggling with lower back pain.
Takeaway
Endurance might win marathons, but it doesn’t cure chronic pain.
If your nervous system is the world’s most sophisticated alarm system, the goal isn’t to rip out the wires. It’s to convince it that the house isn’t on fire anymore. This is where my combination of chiropractic, Dry needling and corrective movement is a process to get the alarm to come back to baseline and work from a place of safety and balance.