The Brain Behind Your Pain: A New Perspective

Pain is unmistakable by design—it’s right in your aching back, stiff neck, sprained ankle, or sore knee, as real as anything. Yet the surprising truth is that pain doesn’t happen in your body, even though it truly seems that way. Having recently passed a kidney stone the old-fashioned way, I can truly and personally

It occurs deep in your brain, even when you break your leg or sprain your spine. Pain happens in the brain. A fact that must permanently shift how we approach pain management.

Your body detects harm—a burn, a cut, a muscle strain. Sensing this directs raw data signals (called nociception) up the spine to your brain, translating them into the pain you feel. Think of the pain as the image from a projector that can be seen on a screen. 

Phantom limb pain is a perfect example of this. The brain can even generate pain in body parts that are missing. Sometimes, the brain gets it wrong and gives the game away—you burn your thumb and feel it in your ring finger instead, or you hurt your wrist but feel the pain throughout the whole arm up into the neck. It’s more common than you might think.

John, an ex-rugby player, showed me this up close. He’s a big, tough guy; he’d had back pain for a decade with no apparent damage on scans. His lower back was stiff, but there wasn’t much wrong with it. Yet it caused him terrible pain. Why would his back hurt so much if it wasn’t damaged?

His ‘pain pathway’ was stuck in a loop, replaying pain from an awful rugby tackle many years prior. So we didn’t just treat his back—we reset the pain pathway with acupuncture and brainwave entrainment to calm his nerves. Within weeks, his pain dropped from a 7 to a 3. Then, gradually, it went down to zero across the following months.

Yet it is still vital to acknowledge that the inflammation, scar tissue, joint stiffness, trapped nerves, biomechanical imbalances, and muscle wasting that most pain sufferers exhibit in some combination still require attention. The problems our bodies face are real.

Think of pain management like this: You know that the pain of a burn or fracture happens deep in the brain, but you still deal with the injury physically. While staying aware of that, with chronic pain, some other tweaks may be needed at the CNS level to assist with truly ending the pain.

Truly resolving pain often requires honoring both the body’s and the central nervous system’s needs. So, for many sufferers, truly effective pain management starts with understanding that the brain calls the shots. From this perspective, it becomes possible to approach pain in a genuinely holistic and genuinely scientific way. Sometimes, that means approaching pain from the top down.