Your Brain Holds the Key to Chronic Pain Relief. Here's How to Use It.
Updated: Jul 6
We need it… until it takes over.
Here's how understanding chronic pain can help you get more relief out of treatment.
Picture this:
Your low back seizes up mid-reach for the coffee pot, pain shoots down your leg, and standing up straight suddenly feels like a personal attack. The moment you try, an involuntary "ugh — ah — OW" escapes your body like it has a mind of its own.
Because, well, it kind of does.
That's pain doing its job, grabbing you by the collar so you don't make things worse. We need it. But to control it, we also need to understand it. Pain is the ultimate love-hate relationship most people don't realize they're in.
What is pain, really?
I'm on one of my sacred mind-cleansing neighborhood walks — headphones in, world tuned out — half-listening to the Armchair Expert Podcast with Dax Shepard, when the episode took a turn to give me butterflies. Enter Rachel Zoffness: neurobiologist, psychologist, self-described "library mouse," and the rare researcher who can drop a peer-reviewed citation and a well-placed curse word in the same breath. She was talking about chronic pain treatment, and one line has been living in my brain ever since:
"Surgeries are important and useful. Medications are important and useful. They are not the only treatment for pain, and they are not the best treatment for chronic pain. Not by a long shot." — Rachel Zoffness, PhD · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Bold claim. But she backs it up, and so does a mountain of research that mainstream medicine and insurance companies have been slow to catch up on.
We've been treating chronic pain like a leaky faucet
The dominant medical model for pain goes like this: something's broken, find the broken thing, fix the broken thing, pain disappears. Simple. Satisfying. Also, wildly incomplete. When it comes to chronic pain, the plumbing approach gets us only about a third of the way there.
Because here's what that model can't explain: phantom limb pain, where people feel searing pain in a limb that isn't even there anymore. Or fibromyalgia, where scans show nothing wrong and the pain is still very, very real. The plumbing metaphor just... breaks down. Something else is going on.
Chronic pain isn't just where you feel it
Pain isn't pain until it reaches your brain, and your brain decides to make it. It's less "ouch" and more judge, jury, and executioner: Is this actually dangerous? How dangerous? How much pain should I dish out right now?
Everything before that is just raw data, signals from danger receptors scattered across your body, tattling on that fresh burn or slipped disc.
Which is why two people can have the exact same MRI and wildly different pain levels. The scan shows the tissue. It has zero opinion on what your brain decides to do with it.
Quieting the danger alarm
So what tips the scale?
Turns out, the same brain regions that manufacture pain also handle your attention, thoughts, memories, and emotions — it's all one messy, interconnected system.
"Your brain is one complex system that's talking with itself, and there's no division that can be made — it's integrated." — Rachel Zoffness, PhD · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Translation: who you're with, what you expect, how safe you feel, or what you've been through all quietly vote on how much pain you experience. Low stress and a good mood aren't just nice; they measurably turn the pain volume down.
Even your social life gets a say. Being around people you love bumps up serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins, your body's own in-house pharmacy that make you feel good, motivated, and decrease pain.
This isn't a "just think happy thoughts" pep talk. It's called the Bio-Psycho-Social Model of pain, and frankly, one of the most underrated frameworks in pain medicine today.
So what do we actually do with this for chronic pain relief?
If you've spent years chasing a structural fix for pain that refuses to respond to structural solutions, that's not a willpower problem. That's not a "you" problem. It's a gap in how we've all been trained to think about pain. Yes, structural pain matters, but it's not the only factor that matters. And it's a gap we can close at Cloud Pine Natural Solutions. We meet you where conventional medicine leaves off and help you fill in the gaps. We call it “building your toolbox”.
Here's an example of what my Low Pain Toolbox looks like:
Biological: an AM scalding hot shower with stretching · anti-inflammatory foods · supplements and an herbal formula · heavy weightlifting · a hard 8 hours of sleep
Psychological: weekly hot yoga · talking nice to myself · long outdoor walks · calm music or a good podcast
Social: evening wind-down with my husband · weekly soccer match at the pub · my standing weekly call with my mom
It's a personalized mix of biological, psychological, and social levers you can actually pull. Not a protocol. Not a pill. A toolbox, yours, specifically. Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.
Shepard, D., Padman, M. (Hosts). (2026, April 15). Rachel Zoffness (on pain) (No. 1036) [Audio podcast episode]. In Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. Armchair Umbrella. https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/rachel-zoffness
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