If you are currently dealing with physical pain, this one’s for you.
Plenty of pain is structural. You break your leg, it’s going to hurt. However, there is always an emotional component to pain, which heightens with any negative story you tell about it: you fear what it means, you’re afraid of the pain itself, or you’re angry with yourself for not looking after yourself.
And some pain has a purely emotional cause: stress leading to tense muscles in your back and neck in a chronic manner, for example, can eventually lead to chronic pain in those areas, or create structural issues like slipped disks and arthritis.
What’s interesting is that structural problems, visible on X-rays and MRI scans, don’t have to cause pain. Beyond the age of 60, around a quarter of the population show tears in their rotator cuff muscles on MRI scans, but two-thirds will be asymptomatic.1 Studies show around 50% of people with no back pain whatsoever have herniated/bulg…
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