I mean, that’s part of pain tolerance. It isn’t just how much pain you feel, it’s how much you can take.
Chronic pain has taught me a lot about what is and isn’t bearable. Things that when they were new would leave me sobbing, I now don’t even show more than a frown and gritted teeth for on a good day.
Part of that is taking the pain, putting it in a little box cake “I will not fucking quit” and throwing that box into the depths of the mind where it can’t bother you for a while. Your body still hurts, you still know it hurts, but you keep going until you can’t, and the pain can just fuck right off.
Now, let me stub my fucking toe while doing all that and it cuts right through all of that and says “nah, dawg, you gonna feel this”. Different pain, and acute.
So, little shit like shocks and needles in muscles, and the like, you know they’re coming, and they go right in the box with the chronic, and into the oubliette of agony.
That kind of pain testing? That’s totally within mental techniques’ ability to ignore. Your pulse will still change, blood pressure too, but it’s still a distant thing that won’t reach you for a while.
But everyone is different. You can take two people with the same injury, and they’ll tolerate it differently, even if they’re siblings of the same gender.
Part of that is indeed built in, but there is always a psychological component to pain perception.
Now, please note that I’m not saying that walling pain off and ignoring it until you’ve injured yourself is a good thing, much less better than letting pain guide your actions so that it isn’t worse later. I’m just saying that the green text is realistic, and the person responding like that may not be bullshitting, they may just have worked on managing pain.
Damn bro. Hope you’re better now.
As better as it gets, thank you :)
I really thought my life was over. Now I’m married, have a kid, good friends, and find ways to enjoy even the bad days.
oubilete of agony
Amazing word smithing. 💖
Thank you :)
Except they misspelled “Oubliette”
Like I give a shit, I knew what the fuck they meant.
This. One of the dangerous things about chronical pain that I think might be underappreciated is that it blinds you to signals that in a healthy person would cause them to seek medical help. When doctors ask now I always caveat that I’m a poor witness of my own wellness because there have been times when I felt like I was doing fine but in fact needed surgery. I don’t know how doctors (or occupational health, or social workers, or carers) do it, there’s basically no reliable information in talking to an ill person but that’s like 90% of what you have to go on.
I feel that.
Back when I was a caregiver, pain assessment was a bit of a pain lol. I’d have patients with cancer, and they’d just not notice something like a sore forming because it just got drowned out by chemo, or whatever. I’d do the daily thing of asking about their pain levels, and how the hell can they answer? They’re at a constant 8 to 10 range, so it’s kinda pointless to try and rely on pain signals to find new pains that need help.
Mind you, I was doing other checks, so nothing got missed, but it could have.
And, like you said, the usual “script” for checking on pain breaks down with chronic pains. You have to really get detailed, focus on tiny changes in pain with them.
And, even knowing all that, I still have trouble communicating my own pain and issues because it’s just so overwhelming sometimes. I sometimes joke with a new doctor or nurse and tell them it would be faster to list what doesn’t hurt. Except it isn’t really a joke.
So I just keep compartmentalizing everything and try to be a good patient lol.
Yeah, I suffer from chronic pain, too, though not to the degree that you appear to. It’s kind of funny because I know I’m really tired or mentally exhausted when I start noticing all the pain I normally have, but just haven’t even noticed for hours before.
It’s impressive what the mind can tolerate.
Your brain can take a hell of a lot of abuse until it can’t.
I was holding it together for nearly 3 decades before it was unable to keep up with major sleep deprivation anymore. 10-12 hours of sleep a night and a nap midday couldn’t keep me going.
I was blacking out time while driving, had barely any memory, had involuntary muscle spasms and couldn’t physically recover from injury in a reasonable time.
Once I started on CPAP I recovered by leaps and bounds, I sleep way less but am fully present in the world, like being on high dose of caffeine without taking anything.
I’m struggling myself there, my mental acuity has dropped, so has my social ability, understanding, and learning. I have UARS and need to get it fixed. I sleep in excess and its never quality. Several sleep studies showed I wake from REM 15-20 times an hour (not to consciousness though).
To anyone not aware of sleep apnea it wouldn’t seem like there was anything wrong with my sleep. I don’t snore, I just don’t breathe continuously when unconscious.
It took about 2 years to fully recover mentally from decades of this shitty sleep. I only found out from visiting my parents and my mom saw me not breathing while I was asleep on the couch. I’ve also had 6 sleep studies in 11 years to try and figure out why it is happening but it is idiopathic.
I can’t remember what people on Reddit with UARS found to be the best treatment but the biggest step always seemed to be getting a doctor to diagnose it properly instead of just signing it off at regular sleep apnea. I hope you find a treatment that helps. The brain can bounce back, so don’t give up hope that you can get your mind back.
Thanks, I am trying to stay hopeful. My next step needs to be an ENT and probably to fix a collapsed nasal cavity. I worked with a neurologist for 3 years (where the sleep studies came from) but they ended up leaving state for persona matters. I live in the USA so I have to go through insurance which doesn’t really recognize UARS. Though I did scratch my way into diagnosis of apnea (sleep study recorded just above the 5% oxygen drop required by insurance) they refused to let me test with a CPAP. It was the only diagnosis my neurologist could use to get insurance to help, still, they won’t really do much for me.
Hopefully soon I can sit in one place without the threat of falling asleep. Or wake up feeling rested and not my eyes burning feeling like I was hit by a brick lmao. Sleep issues are no joke and you’re right to tell people to make sure people get it properly handled ASAP
Turns out, the real experiment was to see how much electric shock a subject would endure due to preconceived notions about gender stereotypes.
Fantastic methodology, no notes
Somewhat related: https://xkcd.com/883/
For a brief moment, I actually thought about doing that during a hospital visit. But luckily decided against it
I can’t find the scene, but Supernaturalhad a scene like that. Sam had recently gotten back from Hell, and he got hurt pretty bad (forgot how, but something like a broken rib or gunshot wound), and a doctor asked him what his pain level was, with 1 being barely noticeable to 10 being the worst pain he ever experienced. He stares off into the distance and says something like “3.”
If you know what they’re testing for, it’s not a good test.
They don’t have to tell you the truth. It could have been to test whether being told that it’s “men vs women” affects the readings test subjects provide
Also they could tell them after completing all tests/finishing ths study.
Not could, will. These days it’s considered unethical not to debrief explaining any deceptive elements of the study. It can also be valuable because the people conducting the study can use it as a chance to find out if the participants knew about the deception, in case that knowledge might have affected the results.
if you think you know what they’re testing for, you’ve been lied to.
I remember seeing a video of a rubber arm experiment that goes through a series of exercises to convince someone’s mind that a rubber arm placed against their shoulder is theirs, while the real one is blocked out of sight. Once these phantom sensations are in place, the organizer then hits the rubber hand with a hammer, causing great shock in the subject but no real harm. The immediate panic is exaggerated by the fact their mind can’t actually move “their” hand out of the way when they see the swing coming.
Another study had organizers shine a harmless light on participants’ arm for a few minutes and see how they react, allegedly for some sampling purpose. The twist was that they would have the real subjects stay in a waiting room beforehand and watch actors leave while appearing to be in considerable pain from the session where the light was targeting. They then experienced a significant burning sensation from the “laser” despite the organizers insisting it was harmless. Some would go as far as to raise their voice and demand the experiment stop.
The idea is that people can be convinced that something is painful just from others’ reactions to it. This may have been what the organizers were actually testing for, and the electrical shock wasn’t real or was barely large enough to felt. But OP was just immune to being influenced. I would expect the ability to follow cues from others has strong correlation to success at socializing, so considering they use 4chan OP might actually just be built different.
I would expect the ability to follow cues from others has strong correlation to success at socializing, so considering they use 4chan OP might actually just be built different.
I want to say that while this correlation is likely true, there’s almost certainly a set of people who understand the signals other people are giving, and get along with people just fine, but trust their own judgement when there’s a conflict and they have no reason to doubt their experience beyond subjective disagreement.
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I’ve spent over a decade in the army where you’re taught to pride yourself into “embracing the suck” and the whole “pain is all in your head” mentality. I have now taken a different career path and realized that this kind of mentality is only useful in very specific cases and is otherwise very bad. But to this day I still tend to downplay and hide my problems/pain whenever things are wrong.
That nearly got me killed a year ago when I showed up at the ER with pulmonary embolism (likely caused by a COVID infection) and the doctor dismissed it because I didn’t look in pain enough for it to be that. The doctor sent me home untreated. It would have likely killed me had I not returned the day after to see another doctor who luckily took me seriously and got me a CT scan that revealed the problem.
Something similar happened to my dad. His “ignore the pain education” came from growing up on a very conservative family farm in the 50s and early 60s rather than from the military, but the result was about the same.
One day, he rang up his GP complaining that his chest “hurt a little bit”. His doctor, knowing how much pain he would have to be in to ever mention it to others told him to get to the nearest hospital immediately.
My dad did so, (DRIVING HIMSELF) and sure enough, his heart was so clogged up that he needed an emergency quadruple bypass.
If he’d had said the same thing to a doctor who didn’t know him and his insanely high learned pain threshold, or followed his initial instinct of not complaining , he would have died home alone at only 50.
Instead, he celebrated his 73rd birthday with friends and family a little over 6 months ago because he went against his son of a farmer “training”.
Anon’s portrait:
Wait, wasn’t that the point of study? How much pain anon can tolerate before crossing the threshold and passing out or chickening out?
Lol no they don’t want him to lie about essentially “not feeling anything”
YFW the part about “to see how men and women react differently to pain” was a ruse. They are actually studying how men rate their pain differently when told they’re being compared to women versus when they’re not.
I think this is a good example of how societal norms impact science.
Hit me again doc! This shit is better than cocaine!
I hate these kind of test. What am I supposed measure the pain against? I do combat sports my idea of pain is going to be different then others
Kind of plausible. I haven’t had a cold since I had an operation in my sinuses several years ago and not really sure the two things are even related. Not feeling electric shocks could be a sensory deficit.
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Well you did young danielsun
