eli5: Is there a limit of how much pain your body can have until it stops getting any worse?

Question

I was wondering if our body has a limit of how much pain it can have until the pain starts to not get worse.

In: Biology

Answer 1

There is a limit to how much excitation you can receive from pain receptors, and how much activation of brain pain centres you can experience. There is a limit to how many action potentials can fire in a second due to their refractory periods, and how long the brain can keep firing pain information before the cells literally start running out of fuel.

However, you would have to contend with numbness from hormones like adrenaline, or the prospect of simply passing out from the pain before it reached its peak, so finding the limit may not be possible.