A person spends his life in constant motion, whose integral companions are injuries and bruises. Pain is one of the natural stimuli and regulators of human actions, which makes the body on a conscious and unconscious level protect itself and protect against various injuries. Each person has an individual pain sensitivity, and this explains the fact that the same actions cause different reactions in different people. Not without reason, some of us are absolutely calmly experiencing injections or any other medical procedures, while others lose consciousness even with the mere thought of a syringe and the slightest touch.
What is a pain threshold and how to measure it
We can say that the pain threshold is the maximum allowable feeling of pain that a person can endure without serious consequences for his health. It is the ability to feel discomfort that can sometimes distinguish a normal adequate person from a person suffering from mental disorders, express the individual’s self-awareness in the world around him and show his attitude towards him. Unfortunately, there is no universal system for reliable measurement of the strength of physical effects, since all our feelings are relative, so the pain threshold is a subjective value.
Sensitivity Changes
With the onset of the new millennium, pediatricians noticed that more and more children began to be born with an elevated pain threshold, although it is rather difficult to explain this phenomenon. In addition, people become more sensitive to pain with overwork and vitamin deficiency, with serious diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system.
In stressful situations, for example, with strong fear or aggression, the pain threshold can increase, and prolonged tension, on the contrary, makes a person more vulnerable. Unlike men, in women, feelings are extremely closely associated with the hormonal background, so female sensitivity to pain can change over time. It is believed that the stronger sex have a higher pain threshold than women, but this is not always the case. In everyday life, even the slightest scratch can cause tears in women, but during childbirth, the fairer sex can show inhuman endurance. By the onset of menopause, the individual pain threshold, as a rule, decreases, although in some cases it happens and vice versa. In addition, during the day it also changes, at night all feelings seem sharper. Women are more vulnerable to severe pain, but prolonged exposure is much easier to tolerate than men.
This feeling is directly related to human psychology, because subjective perception can only worsen the situation and increase discomfort. Fear of possible pain provokes a deception of feelings, a person may think that he is already unbearably bad, although there is no impact yet. With age, the sensitivity decreases significantly, which may be associated with age-related pathological changes in the conducting nerve fibers and blood vessels.
In some cases, a low pain threshold can be a sign of depression, but a decrease in sensitivity sometimes serves as a symptom of the development of schizophrenia or other similar mental illness. Of course, a person can independently try to change his pain threshold, however, training will not always give the expected result. Self-torture is not characteristic of a mentally full-fledged personality, because we are guided by the instinct of self-preservation, so people who harm themselves to get discomfort need urgent medical and psychiatric help.