My Theory of Pain

by John Lawrence, September 30, 2019

Pain is ubiquitous in human life - both mental and physical pain. Being human is to have pain in your life. Coping with pain can take different forms - both positive and negative. The body has natural ways that pain can be alleviated. These involve the secretion of different chemicals like dopamine that cover up the pain or take it away. There are various ways to get these chemicals to activate, the easiest being to ingest some substance like drugs or alcohol. The harder way to do it is by exercise. Runner's high is known to reduce pain. Other forms of physical and perhaps mental activities like meditation can also do it. Running or other strenuous physical activity can induce the body to produce the drugs which overcome pain. The problem is that these activities are painful in and of themselves and require a high form of motivation to get them started and self-discipline to persist.

Continuing major efforts to reduce pain both positive and negative can lead to addiction both positive and negative. The problem with negative addiction is that the ingestion of drugs or alcohol is limited by tolerance. It requires more and more of the substance to get the same beneficial results unless a person is very self disciplined in their consumption. There is only a certain fountain of dopamine available, and this gets depleted as the substances used to release it are taken repeatedly. Less and less dopamine being released means that more and more of the substance used to release it needs to be ingested leading to addiction. Finally, as in heroin addiction, the person is using heroin not to feel better but just not to feel worse.

On the other hand activities which strengthen the mind/body and require self discipline and even pain such as running or weight training result in a release of dopamine which actually makes you feel better when the activity ceases and strengthens the body and that part of the body which creates the dopamine in the first place. The body, which is weakened at first by the activity, builds itself back up to a higher level because of the activity which reduces the source of the pain. As time goes on, pain is reduced not only from the dopamine releasing activity, but also because the body has reduced the source of the pain because it has become stronger.

Negative addiction is so common because it requires no self discipline. Activities which can lead to positive addiction require actual work, and this turns off many people who succumb to negative addiction because it is so much easier to relieve pain that way AT FIRST. As time goes on, however, using substances to overcome pain only makes the pain worse in the long run and reduces the fountain of dopamine which is necessary to overcome it. William Glasser wrote a book entitled "Positive Addiction." According to this article in Psychology Today there are six characteristics of positive addiction:

1. It is something noncompetitive that you choose to do and you can devote approximately an hour per day;

2. It is possible for you to do it easily and it doesn’t take a good deal of mental effort to do it well;

3. You can do it alone or rarely with others but it does not depend upon others to do it;

4. You believe that it has some value (physical, mental, or spiritual) for you;

5. You believe that if you persist at it you will improve—but this is completely subjective—you need to be the only one who measures the improvement; and

6. The activity must have the quality that you can do it without criticizing yourself. If you can’t accept yourself during this time the activity will not be addicting (emphasis original). 

Positive activities require self discipline and even the experiencing of some pain as they are undertaken. They result in the diminution of pain only over the long term. They may or may not result in instantaneous gratification whereas drug use is usually instantaneously gratifying until the dopamine fountain is used up or until tolerance sets in. Tolerance occurs when the person no longer responds to the drug in the way that person initially responded. Stated another way, it takes a higher dose of the drug to achieve the same level of response achieved initially. Tolerance increases with negative addiction, but is reduced with positive addiction. In other words positive addicts increase the body's ability to release dopamine over time, but negative addiction does the opposite.

Nevertheless, if managed properly, addictive substances can be used at least by some persons in a temperate manner without their leading to the worst effects of drug addiction. The jazz musician, Art Blakey, was a heroin user most of his life, and he was also a cigarette smoker. He died at 71 from lung cancer probably from the effects of cigarette smoking rather than from heroin usage. Two of his proteges, Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan, weren't so lucky however. Both died young and suffered from the ravages of drug addiction. A lot of the negative effects of substance abuse can probably be ameliorated or offset by positive activities as moderate use of drugs doesn't seem to cause people to be dysfunctional or debilitated.