VA News – Pain is like an alarm system that goes off when danger is detected. While pain offers a protective buffer to help prevent injury, if it persists this buffer can become overprotective and our alarm system becomes oversensitive and overprotective.
Chronic and persistent pain is our body’s alarm system becoming oversensitive and going off all the time, even when there is no actual danger. This is the brain continuing to produce pain when there is no real danger to the body and when we understand how pain really works, we can find and develop effective strategies for working with it.
