A man on a construction site in the UK jumped down from scaffolding and landed on a long nail. It went straight through his boot and out the other side. He was in agony — rushed to hospital, given strong pain medication before anyone dared touch the boot. When they finally eased it off, they found the nail had passed cleanly between his toes. There was no wound at all. His pain had been completely real, and there was nothing physically damaged.

Around the same time, a different builder shot a nail into his hand with a nail gun while working alone. He felt almost nothing, drove himself calmly to the hospital, and only there discovered how deep the nail had gone.

Same tool, opposite experiences. One man in severe pain with no injury; the other with a real injury and almost no pain. These two well-known cases capture something that quietly reshaped how I think about pain — and it's the heart of the Mind-Body approach I studied with Dr. Howard Schubiner, author of Unlearn Your Pain.

Pain is an alarm, not a damage meter

We tend to assume pain equals damage: the more it hurts, the worse the injury. But pain is better understood as your brain's threat-detection system — an internal smoke alarm. Its job isn't to measure tissue damage; it's to protect you. And the brain decides, moment to moment and entirely below conscious awareness, whether to sound that alarm.

That's why the same injury can hurt enormously in one situation and barely register in another. It's also why, like any smoke alarm, it can misfire — sounding loudly when there's only a wisp of smoke, or no real danger at all.

Here's the part that surprised me most: research in this field shows that emotional stress lights up the same pain-processing networks in the brain as a physical injury. To your nervous system, the pain from a stressful season of life and the pain from a sprain can be produced by the very same circuitry. Both are real. Both genuinely hurt.

Two kinds of pain

Broadly, pain tends to fall into two categories:

Structural pain comes from a physical cause — an injury, tissue damage, a fracture, an infection, inflammation. Medical exams and scans usually reveal it, and it behaves consistently: press on a broken bone and it hurts more, reliably.

Neural circuit pain (also called non-structural, neuroplastic, or mind-body pain) is generated by learned nerve pathways rather than ongoing damage. There's no tumour, fracture, or active injury driving it — and yet the pain is completely real, because all pain, of every kind, is ultimately produced by the brain.

One of the clearest teachings from the course: once a serious structural cause has been properly ruled out by a doctor, and pain has persisted well beyond the time an injury would normally heal, it's worth gently considering whether neural circuits are keeping the alarm switched on.

How pain gets "learned"

There's a well-known phrase in neuroscience, from Canadian researcher Donald Hebb: "neurons that fire together, wire together." Our brains are remarkably good at learning patterns — how to ride a bike, play an instrument, or, without meaning to, how to produce pain.

If a certain movement, or a stressful moment, coincides with pain often enough, the brain can start pairing the two. Before long, bending over, sitting, a change in the weather, a bright screen, or even the anticipation of a stressful visit can trigger real discomfort — a conditioned response, running automatically. It's not imagined, and it's not your fault. It's simply a pattern the brain has practised well.

The genuinely good news

That doesn't mean it's quick or effortless — learned pathways can take time to soften — but it does mean the situation isn't fixed. And for many people, simply understanding this changes something. So much of what keeps us stuck is being told, over and over, that something is permanently wrong with us.

Why our instincts backfire

When pain shows up, most of us react in one of six understandable ways — what the course memorably called the six F's:

• Fear — being afraid it will continue
• Focus — monitoring and fixating on it
• Fighting it — hating it, giving it power
• Frustration — letting it enrage us
• Figuring it out — endlessly analysing the cause
• Fixing it — working desperately to make it stop

Every one of these is completely normal. But for neural circuit pain, they're the opposite of helpful — each one signals to the brain that the pain is dangerous, which turns the alarm up louder.

The alternative is counter-intuitive but lovely: treat the pain the way you'd treat a frightened child. When a little one takes a tumble, you don't panic — you smile and say, "You're okay, that'll pass, keep going." That calm reassurance teaches the child there was no real danger. We can offer our own nervous system the same thing. In fact, three things reliably turn this kind of pain down: reassurance (a felt sense of safety), compassion (kindness toward yourself), and laughter (lightness and joy).

Clues it might be neural circuit pain

In the course, we learned a simple set of clues — the FIT pattern — that can rule in a mind-body component once a doctor has ruled out structural causes:

• Functional — pain in an unusual pattern (a whole limb, or mirror-image spots on both sides), pain that outlasts a healed injury, or symptoms that feel tingling, burning, hot, or cold.
• Inconsistent — pain that shifts location, changes with the time of day, eases on holiday or during joyful distraction, or comes on only after activity rather than during it.
• Triggered — pain set off by things unrelated to the body part itself: weather, foods, sounds, light, screens, stress, or even just imagining a triggering activity.

None of this is a diagnosis you can hand yourself — but if several of these ring true, it's a strong hint worth exploring further, ideally with support.

A gentle way to explore for yourself

To make this less abstract, I built a short, self-paced exploration you can try right here on the site. It walks you, one gentle question at a time, through a version of the "provocative test" I learned in the course — a simple way of noticing how your pain responds to pressure and to calm, curious attention. It takes a couple of minutes, and it's designed to be soothing rather than clinical.

It won't diagnose you, and it isn't meant to. Think of it as a starting point for reflection — a way to get curious about where your pain might be coming from.

How this connects to my work

If your exploration leans toward a neural circuit pattern, this is exactly the territory my Biofield Tuning work is designed for: helping calm an over-protective nervous system and gently working with the emotional and energetic body, so the alarm can settle over time.

If it leans structural, that matters just as much — please see a medical professional about it. Alongside medical care, I also offer BioGeometry to support your body's energetic systems while you heal. It's a complement to treatment, never a replacement for it.

Warmest regards,
Van · BioDiVita

Gratefully based on the Mind-Body / Pain Reprocessing work of Dr. Howard Schubiner (Unlearn Your Pain), building on the lineage of Dr. John Sarno. If you'd like to read further, consider these starting points Unlearn Your Pain (Schubiner), The Way Out (Alan Gordon), and the free Tell Me About Your Pain podcast on the Curable app.