Pain is a voice that will free you
For most of us our world is more prosperous than it has ever been. So why is there so much unhappiness and dissatisfaction?
No matter how fast you run, /your shadow more than keeps up. Sometimes it’s in front. /Only full, overhead sun /diminishes your shadow.
But that shadow has been serving you. /What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle. /Your boundaries are your quest.
It’s impossible not to be struck by the duality of our existence as wars rage and climates change. Life seems to be a pendulum between extremes and even if the disaster isn’t in the periphery of our own small lives, the vicarious, insidious trauma of others feels to be creeping ever closer.
I am in awe of the polarity of the human experience, down to our very physiology with the splitting of our brains and nervous systems between left and right. Did you know that your right brain controls the left side of your body and vice versa? Our bodies are run on exchanges between negative and positive charges.
“No matter how fast you run, your shadow more than keeps up.”
An ironic overlap in neuroscience is where pain and pleasure meet in the brain, a shared network of experience in the body. Both the channels for communicating these feelings, and the biochemical messengers to do so, are shared.
Dr Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, describes the reciprocal relationship between these two experiences. Assuming that humans are for the most part seeking pleasure or shying away from pain, understanding these pathways is central to what drives us and perpetuates our behaviours. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter best understood in this arena, responsible for what drives and motivates us to behave and repeat those behaviours.
Lembke explains that pain and pleasure might best be understood as a seesaw. What follows a deeply gratifying pleasure is a reciprocal absence of that pleasure or a craving for it.
This is most notable after the use of a recreational drug that induces euphoria. Inevitably what goes up must come down and what follows is deeply uncomfortable. Conversely, the experience of pain or hardship is often followed by the suffusion of a relief that could be experienced as a pleasure.
The three main neurotransmitters at play here are dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Historically, it was thought that serotonin was only elevated in response to an hedonic experience, but we now know from rodent studies that it’s the intensity of an experience that elevates serotonin levels and not the type of experience. A deep hardship or enduring exercise will also elevate serotonin.
This makes so much sense when we think about people who are hooked into a cycle of toxic experience. Anyone who has experienced grief and loss intimately is more likely to have a more sensitive appreciation of its opposites.
There is something inherently painful about being alive that is paired with all of our possibility, expansiveness and capacity for joy.
The modern world view denounces this nuanced reciprocity and in so doing drives a polarised appreciation of the world.
Many experts are suggesting that our disconnection from pain and our allegiance to comfort is the root of our undoing. “With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time,” Lembke said.
The greater the ease with which we can achieve our comforts, the greater our experience of withdrawal, longing and emptiness.
Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, writes that a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best — physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder — after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day.
Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems such as obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression and anxiety, as well as even more fundamental issues such as feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.
We all know the satisfaction of an arduous challenge. And we all know the potential ennui of people who have it all. Is our preoccupation with making our lives more comfortable and convenient the route of our displeasure and collective undoing?
It is clear that if we rewind thousands of years to medieval times, raids, rapes, violence and looting were the order of the day for survival and appropriation of resources. With the evolution of the prefrontal cortex and the advent of civilisation and industry, we observe a decrease in the powers of evil in the Western ideal where these kinds of actions are put right by a prevailing, overarching moral fibre.
In spite of civilisations being less violent (for most of us) and resources being more abundant (for some of us), there is a prevailing sense that people are more miserable than ever before. And our discomfort with anything uncomfortable or painful has led 25% of America to a daily psychiatric prescription drug.
We have combined the seeking of instant gratification with the numbing of any and all physical and psychological discomfort. Has the absence of ardour culled our pleasure ethics? Have we forgotten that pain is a voice the body uses to speak? Rumi reminds us, “what hurts you blesses you. The darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest.”
Even our ever increasing access to witnessing the cloak of anguish that shrouds so much of the world is dulled by the two dimensions of our screens.
We are subdued by disconnection, sugar, Instagram, online porn, central heating and opioids. If we turn our gaze inward, away from these distractions and pleasure pursuits, we might better intuit the message that is there for us. Through the quiet and aloneness of that discomfort we might find ourselves more free.
‘What hurts you blesses you. The darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest’