What is Pain?
Day 120 / 365
Every weekend I say to myself that I’ll write a few of these blogs in advance so that in case of an emergencies I can take a day off and still not miss my daily target. But not once did I do that. It’s like there are multiple versions of me. The optimistic one that decided to do this challenge at the start of the year, the lazy one that doesn’t write more on weekends, and at last the one that lives in the present moment that has to put up with the shit of the other two and actually do the work.
The reason I might sound a bit bitter in today’s blog is because I am in pain. Nothing even remotely severe, but still I would rather not have to write something tonight. But the show must go on, so I thought I might read up a bit on pain to try to take my mind off pain.
Why do we feel pain?
What we have always been told is that pain is a signal from our body that something might be wrong. It would be much better if there was a better signal, like blinking lights on the CPU. But the fact that pain is uncomfortable is important, as it makes you do something about it.
Pain isn’t only physical
Pain isn’t just physical, it’s emotional as well. And the amount and kind of pain one would feel would depend a lot upon the attitude and the mental status of the individual.
Pain leads to stress and anger. More stress leads to more pain. It’s a bad vicious circle.
How Pain killers work
While in most cases our goal would be to identify the core cause of the pain and fix that, in some cases we might want to temporarily stop the pain as well while we are handling the core cause. That’s where pain killers come in.
Our brains communicate with the rest of our bodies through a network of nerves. Pain killers would affect this network at some part, so as to modify the messages going to the pain. So if the injured part is sending a signal to the brain that it should feel pain, a pain killer would alter this signal before it reaches the brain in a way that the feeling of the pain is avoided.
While pain killers might feel like a godsend while you are in a lot of pain, it’s something that you should take in moderation. Pain killer addiction is a serious problem. This is because some prescription pain killers, especially opioids would give you a high, quite similar to what you get from recreational drugs.
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — The International Date Line