People can struggle with the idea that many things contribute to pain, especially when most of us grow up with — and have that belief reinforced — the idea that pain means something is broken and needs to be fixed. While the biopsychosocial and emotional model of pain is accurate, it can feel too vast and abstract for people to easily change lanes into. A more helpful way to think about pain is not in terms of damage, but in terms of how reactive and responsive our system has become over time.
Sometimes pain is triggered not by injury, but by ordinary signals from the body — like stiffness, pressure, or movement — that are interpreted as a threat when the system is already on high alert. Pain often still needs some input from the body, but that input can be very small, completely normal, and not related to tissue damage at all. The signal itself might be normal — it’s the volume knob that’s turned up.
One way to make this easier to understand is through a simple cooking analogy. Think of your nervous system like a frying pan. The background heat on the pan represents the total load the system is under — stress, poor sleep, previous pain experiences, fear, workload, and life pressure. The oil in the pan represents protective factors such as recovery, confidence with movement, feeling safe, understanding pain, and good support. When the pan is cool and well oiled, you can drop food into it and nothing dramatic happens. But when the pan is dry and overheated, even a small piece of food can burn instantly and stick.
In pain, causation is often threefold. There are predisposing factors that make the system more reactive, initiating factors — often normal movements or everyday loads — that act as the trigger, and maintaining factors that keep the heat high and allow pain to linger or become chronic. The goal isn’t to avoid movement or eliminate sparks altogether, but to reduce the background heat and improve the system’s tolerance. When we do that, those same sparks are far less likely to catch, and pain becomes less intense, less persistent, and less threatening.
