Fear Increases Pain
But fear doesn’t just magnify our senses. Fear also amplifies danger signals like pain. A group of researchers proved this using terrifying pictures and a hot probe. Fun! In this experiment, people got hot pulses on their skin randomly while looking through a series of photos. Some of the pictures were scary, while others were neutral. Even though the pulses were all the same, the subjects experienced much more pain when looking at the scary photos.
What’s really interesting is that sometimes the participants felt pain when there was no hot pulse at all. But this happened only when they were looking at the scary photos, not the neutral ones. The fear from the pictures put their brains on high alert, and they experienced pain even when the probe was off. - Book: The Way Out
Fear is the fuel for the pain. A study in the Netherlands showed this phenomenon in action. The researchers recruited people with low back pain and measured how much pain-related fear they had. When they followed up six months later, the people who scored high on fear were much more likely to still be in pain. This was true regardless of how bad their pain was initially or how long they’d had it. The Dutch scientists looked at back pain, but dozens of studies on everything from headaches to knee pain to fibromyalgia all show the same pattern. The more fear you have around your pain, the more likely your pain is to continue. - Book: The Way Out
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