The Nervous System’s Best Guess

Pain is not what’s happening to you. It’s what your brain thinks is happening, based on everything it knows, fears, and remembers.

Pain Is a Prediction, Not a Passive Process

Your nervous system is not just a messenger. It’s a meaning-making machine.

When you stub your toe or tweak your back, pain doesn’t instantly travel from the body to the brain like a wire signal. Instead, your brain receives noisy, incomplete input, and makes its best guess about what it means (Clark et al., 2019).

Pain is the result of that guesswork.

Sometimes it’s accurate.

Other times, it’s a false alarm.

And in chronic pain? The alarm system might be stuck in prediction mode, firing before anything even happens.

How Does the Brain Predict Pain?

Let’s break it down:

Your brain constantly asks:

• “Have we felt this before?”

• “Was it dangerous?”

• “Should I protect you now, just in case?”

It compares incoming signals with prior experiences and outputs pain if the match seems threatening enough (Seth, 2013). In other words:

Pain is the output of perceived threat, not the input of actual damage.

Examples of Prediction in Action

🔸 Phantom limb pain: People can feel pain in a missing limb because the brain still “predicts” threat in that body part’s virtual map.

🔸 Old injuries: You may feel pain in a healed area simply because the brain is conditioned to associate that location with harm.

🔸 Fear-avoidance: If bending over used to hurt, the brain may predict pain even after healing, and deliver it preemptively.

These aren’t “mistakes.” They’re the brain trying to protect you, based on its story of the past.

This Changes Everything for Healing

If pain is the result of a nervous system prediction…

✅ Then movement can be used to update that prediction.

✅ Education can help the brain recalibrate threat.

✅ Context (safe environment, trust, language) can turn the volume down.

Your job isn’t to “fight” pain. It’s to update the inputs.

What You Can Do Today

• Move gently but consistently. Movement is information.

• Name the pattern. “This is my brain’s best guess, not a sign of damage.”

• Change the context. Music, environment, company—anything that signals safety.

• Learn the science. Understanding prediction reduces threat.

And most of all, be patient. Prediction systems don’t change overnight. But they do change with repetition and trust.

Final Thought

Your pain is real.

But it may not be real-time.

When you understand that pain is your brain’s best guess, not your body’s worst outcome—you unlock a powerful truth:

You can teach your nervous system to guess differently.

And that’s where healing begins.

References

1. Clark, J., Nijs, J., Yeowell, G., & Goodwin, P. C. (2019). What are the predictors of altered central pain modulation in chronic musculoskeletal pain populations? Pain Physician, 22(6), E611–E632.

2. Seth, A. (2013). Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(11), 565–573.

3. Moseley, G. L., & Butler, D. S. (2015). Explain Pain Supercharged. Noigroup Publications.