How Stress Creates Chronic Pain (The Mind-Body Connection)

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In this video, I tell you all about how chronic stress can create real, physical pain. I take you through how the autonomic nervous system works, why modern life keeps us stuck in fight-or-flight, and how this constant stress contributes to chronic pain through neuroplatic mechanisms in the brain.

Learn why the brain can generate pain without injury, how emotional stress activates the same neural circuits as physical pain, and how the pain-fear cycle keeps symptoms alive.

If you think you might have neuroplastic pain, take our neuroplastic pain assessment and explore how neural circuit retraining and hypnotherapy can help you heal.


Referenced studies:
Derbyshire, S. W. G., Whalley, M. G., Stenger, V. A., & Oakley, D. A. (2004). Cerebral activation during hypnotically induced and imagined pain. NeuroImage, 23(1), 392–401. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage....

Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E. E., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(15), 6270–6275. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102693108

Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2004). Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(7), 294–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.0...


My name is Andreas Dovland and I'm the founder of MindBodyConnection.org. Our mission is to help professionals out of chronic pain so they can live fully and move freely again.