Eli5: If you are In pain, and you fall asleep, what “happens” to the pain?
In: Biology
When you sleep, a lot of the neurons in your brain and brain stem just ‘turn off’ to rest. These include the neurons responsible for sending pain signals. The thing causing the pain continues to trigger the nerves at the site of the injury, but the signal gets interrupted at your brain stem and doesn’t reach the conscious parts of your brain.
Pain is all in your head. There’s more to it, but until your brain says those nerve impulses are pain, they’re just signals from nerves. Could be hot, cold, touch, tickling.
When your brain gets so tired it falls asleep, it stops processing those signals, and doesn’t register them as pain.
So what’s happening when we are woken up by pain?
My woman suffers from chronic pain (spinal issues and the aftermath of a pilon fracture) and the effect there is that her quality of sleep is just absolute trash every night. She’s an outlier, but it’s an example of what’s possible.
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