💤 Is Pain Like Sleep?
For centuries, sleep was seen as a passive, unproductive pause. But modern neuroscience revealed it’s one of the most active and essential processes in the body. Sleep repairs, resets, and rebalances us.
“Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.”
— Dr. Matthew Walker
What if pain is the same?
We’ve long treated pain as a glitch. But we now know that pain — especially chronic pain — is an adaptive, predictive system. It doesn’t just detect damage. It interprets threat, history, and meaning.
“Pain is not a measure of the state of your tissues. It is a measure of the state of the system that protects those tissues.”
— Dr. Lorimer Moseley
Pain is the body’s safety system at work, not a failure of biology. Like sleep, it can be disrupted by stress and reshaped by experience. Like sleep, it deserves understanding — not suppression.
We’re only just beginning to understand what pain really is.
That changes everything.