All signs point to “yes”. Most of us do.

But first, I want to share something that recently had me quietly celebrating. It’s some research that was published in June of this year in the Journal of the International Study of Pain and it’s about something as seemingly mundane as paying attention.

My TEDx talk from 2020 was also about paying attention and it was criticized (by only a select few) as not being research-based, which is plainly untrue and with each passing year, supporting evidence continues to emerge. This is just the latest:

“Current research has shown that even those who have never encountered mindfulness can achieve significant analgesic effects with a simple attention task. Thus, the analgesic effect of focused attention on pain, an interesting phenomenon shown in this study, could potentially be used for pain management in clinical settings.”[1]

“…significant ANALGESIC effects…” !

Paying attention

On the surface it seems like paying attention to things like pain would be a big “duh”, but it isn’t actually a “given” for many people. My talk idea came from what I witness on a daily basis in my practice. I believe, not knowing how to pay attention or what to pay attention to, is at the very root of all the suffering that shows up at my office doorstep.

Most of us are not taught to value early signs of any of our basic body needs. We learn that our biology is inconvenient and embarrassing. That’s how many of us feel about pain — it’s inconvenient and embarrassing — but that’s also how we feel about things like thirst, hunger, fatigue and the need to urinate or have a bowel movement. I think this attitude does us a terrible health disservice with long term consequences.

I believe pain is in the same category of importance as all of these other biological needs. Tuning out any one of them will result in some form of suffering down the road. When people tune out any or all of these things for decades, they show up in my office in pain, confused and frustrated.

In my last post where I suggest doing the “cranky baby test”, I touch on the idea that our basic biological needs can have a real impact on our emotional wellbeing which in my opinion is inseparable from our physical wellbeing. By tuning into any of those needs we can solve a lot of different kinds of discomfort. Pain can be intimately tied up with any or all basic body functions.

As I touch on in my book series The Everyday Pain Guide, some types of pain respond to mechanical troubleshooting, but many types of pain also need attention to the underlying biochemistry before lasting relief is ever possible. This means I often end up teaching patients how to tune into and tend to things like: sleep or food intake or hydration or elimination.

None of this is easy after a lifetime of ignoring and devaluing the body signals like fatigue, thirst, hunger, full bladder etc. But once you re-learn how to pay attention — be mindful of your needs — you open the door to more holistic and humane self-care.

Crossed signals

If you are dealing with a persistent pain and you feel like you’ve tried everything else, you might still benefit from a re-assessment of any number of your own biological needs, which may be going unrecognized and unmet. After decades of denying the basics, sometimes we need outside help to decode what it is that we really need. That’s only the first step. Then we need ideas for how to re-set the signals in a way that allows us to learn to listen better going forward. Messages can easily get crossed when we don’t know how to listen.

Have you heard that sometimes when we think we’re hungry, we’re actually needing to hydrate and not necessarily eat? Sometimes when we feel tired, we’re actually low on certain nutrients. Sometimes if we can’t sleep it’s because we didn’t fuel ourselves with the right food that day or maybe we haven’t eliminated well. This body signal confusion is the result of decades spent denying ourselves our basic needs.

---

Don’t be afraid to get help deciphering your body’s signals and don’t feel badly that you don’t know how to interpret them at this point in your life. You’re not alone. But you should know that often the answers are simple. It is just a bit like a puzzle that needs solving because we are all unique.

---

[1] Kim, Donghoa,b; Woo, Choong-Wana,c,d,*; Kim, Seong-Gia,c,d Neural mechanisms of pain relief through paying attention to painful stimuli, PAIN: June 2022 — Volume 163 — Issue 6 — p 1130–1138 doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002464