Most people with chronic pain have noticed that their symptoms worsen during periods of stress. A difficult week at work, a family conflict, financial pressure: the pain intensifies, the tension increases, and recovery feels further away. This is not a coincidence and it is not a matter of perception. It is a direct neurological effect, and understanding it changes how the pain needs to be approached.
Shared Pathways
Stress and pain share significant neurological infrastructure. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which regulates the body’s stress response, and the nociceptive pathways that process pain signals interact extensively. The stress hormones released during psychological stress, primarily cortisol and adrenaline, have direct effects on pain sensitivity.
Cortisol, in short bursts, can actually reduce pain perception by suppressing inflammation. In chronic stress, however, the sustained presence of cortisol dysregulates the inflammatory system rather than suppressing it, and the chronic low-grade inflammation that results increases peripheral nociceptor sensitivity. The pain threshold drops. Stimuli that would previously have been below the level of discomfort become painful.
Adrenaline increases sympathetic nervous system activity, which maintains muscular tension throughout the body and keeps the nervous system in a state of heightened arousal. A person under sustained psychological stress is, at the physiological level, in a state of continuous mild fight-or-flight activation. Their muscles are more contracted. Their pain pathways are more sensitive. Their capacity to tolerate and recover from pain is reduced.
The Cycle That Sustains Chronic Pain
Stress worsens pain. Pain increases stress. Increased stress prevents the nervous system from downregulating sufficiently to support recovery. The cycle is self-reinforcing and can be extremely difficult to break from within, particularly when the person is also managing the life circumstances that generated the stress in the first place.
This is why pain management approaches that address only the physical dimension often produce limited results for people under significant psychological stress. The stress is maintaining the physiological conditions that sustain the pain, and those conditions do not change simply because the structure has been treated.
How Body Stress Release Addresses the Cycle
Body Stress Release addresses the physiological dimension of the stress-pain cycle by reducing stored tension in the nervous system and supporting parasympathetic activation. As the body releases accumulated tension, the baseline level of sympathetic arousal decreases. Pain thresholds recover. The nervous system’s capacity to regulate itself improves.
Peter van Minnen works with patients for whom stress and pain are clearly intertwined, and the BSR approach is well suited to this presentation because it does not add further physical stress to an already overloaded system.
For the psychological dimension of this cycle, the support of counselling and psychotherapy or an understanding of the physical cost of emotional stress can be valuable alongside the physical work.
The role of Reiki in supporting nervous system downregulation and stress reduction is something our holistic wellness practitioners can also discuss with you.
If stress and pain are feeding each other and you cannot find a way out of the cycle, contact us to speak with Peter van Minnen at Hever Health.