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Pain

Sorry to be a pain

I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance.  Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance.

We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child.  For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that).

But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was.  Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke people with hot objects.

They took about 500 people and asked them to rank their pain sensitivity as well as their levels of anxiety.  Then they poked them with hot things at progressively increasing temperature to figure out where the cut-off points were.

They found that basically everybody had the same pain threshold and tolerance, no matter what they thought their personal pain sensitivity was.  Interestingly though people with higher levels of anxiety also felt that they were more sensitive to pain.  That does make some sense as higher anxiety levels promote the fear of potential pain down the road and you get into a vicious cycle of pain being amplified by the psyche.

You can gander at the full study here if you're interested, or else just use at parties when people are talking about how "I have a pretty high tolerance for pain ..."

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