Are You in More Pain Than You Need to Be?

how helpful pain can become overprotective pain

The pain started out as a visitor and ended up a full-time resident.

It came in as a headache but became my identity: “I have migraines. I can’t lift my arms over my head. I can’t run. I can’t make plans. I can’t go on walks.”

The visitor didn’t just move in; it started rearranging my life. I stopped making plans, working, running, and even going on walks. And started calculating whether something would hurt before deciding whether to do it, and avoiding more activities than I attempted.

And the sad part is that every restriction made perfect sense because I thought I was protecting myself from more pain. But eventually, the pain didn’t have to stop me because I just stopped myself.

“There comes a time in your life when everything hurts,” I decided. “You can’t always be active. You are not like normal people. You live in the prison of chronic pain. And parole is not an option.” After all, how could it be, when I was given a life sentence?

By the time I noticed pain’s power over my life, it was too late. Or at least that’s what I thought.

But then I met Dr. Sam, who gave me an entirely different way of seeing what was happening. My body wasn’t a prison. It was a fortress that had become so overprotective that it kept me locked inside.

The key that unlocked my cell door was a simple vocabulary lesson: helpful vs. overprotective.

“Which type of pain do you have?” he asked. “Helpful pain is protecting something that needs protection, like an injury or a tissue issue. Overprotective pain is real pain too, but the alarm has become louder or longer-lasting than the protection your body actually needs.”

For me, the pain that had taken over my world like a slumlord, lowering my quality of life and dictating what I could and couldn’t do, was no longer protecting me. It was overprotecting me. And I definitely didn’t need more protection; I needed an education.

The education itself was elementary, but accepting it made me question almost everything I believed about pain because I had spent years treating pain as a measure of what was wrong with my body, when pain was actually my brain attempting to protect me. That realization changed what I needed to do. Instead of treating every instance of pain as a reason to retreat, I had to practice safety and teach my brain that I didn’t need the protection it thought I did.

And within a matter of weeks, the prison doors swung open. I could do things that would have made migraines inevitable. Like going back to the gym and going for long walks. Things I thought were off the table for me were suddenly back on.

And this freedom didn’t stop with my physical life, but permeated my emotional and spiritual life too.

Dr. Sam had taught me about pain, but my mind was finding freedom from far more than chronic pain. I started seeing the fingerprints of an overprotective brain in my anxiety, my fears, and even in my relationship with God.

The same brain that was trying to protect my body from pain was also trying to protect my life from uncertainty, disappointment, loss, and anything else it couldn’t control. And I started to see how much of what I called worry was really just me trying to protect myself from a future God had never put me in charge of.

This discovery was so life-changing that I finally told Dr. Sam I wanted to write a book with him about the overprotective brain. I then spent the next year immersed in neuroscience, studying the research and learning how the brain protects us so I could translate that science into something the rest of us could actually understand and use.

Now, a year later, that book is a reality. The Overprotective Brain comes out Tuesday, August 4th, and I’m so excited to finally put it into your hands. I got the information I desperately needed, and now I get to pass it on to you.

If you are tired of no one giving you answers, or if you have just given up trying, let me be a cautionary tale with a surprisingly hopeful ending. There may be more freedom available to you than you think, and it may be easier than you ever imagined.

If you’ve reluctantly concluded that this is just the life your body has sentenced you to, I want you to know why I no longer believe every sentence pain hands down is final.

Check out our website to find out more. You can also watch our podcast on YouTube and buy the book on Amazon.