Sometimes when we hurt ourselves the pain doesn’t register until after we have seen the wound. Why?
In: 18
Adrenaline surpresses / dampens the feeling of pain and you usually only start inspecting your wound once that wears off. Your body wants to maintain functioning until the immediate danger is avoided and it can safely regenerate.
You can’t just not look at it and it wont hurt, it’s more like that you only begin seeing the wound when its starting to hurt.
Slightly off topic but the brain’s ability to prioritize keeping you alive by focusing on what’s front and center is amazing. Let me briefly explain. I developed Gastroparesis after a motorcycle accident in 2015. Unbearable nausea 24 x 7 for months and months. I lost 130lbs. After 6 different antiemetics ( at one point simultaneously) failed to give me any relief, I abandoned them ( I didn’t know what was wrong at this point). The side effects were horrific. Anyway when I wanted to vomit real bad, I would strip down to a T-shirt and pair of running shorts, socks and shoes. I would then go outside and go for a walk. It was December/January. 29 degrees and frosty. As soon as I started to really get cold, bye bye nausea. I would walk and the sit, for as long as my emaciated and distraught body would go. The relief often made me cry. Anyway my body would prioritize not sending me your going to vomit signals and start sending your dying of cold signals when I got cold. Voilà fini relief.
ELI5: Say for example you’re a waiter at a busy restaurant. You have a table that’s getting upset about their order taking too long, and they’re getting ready to just leave. You run to the kitchen, trying to tell the head chef/owner what’s going on. They’re too busy yelling at the other kitchen staff/listening to the other waiters to register what you’re saying. You go back to your table, they decide to get up and leave….you go back to the kitchen again…this time the front of house manager also tells the Chef/owner about the table…Chef finally looks, rushes their order out personally to calm the table….
Basically that’s what going on in your brain. It’s like grand central station, receiving hundred of inputs every second. You can’t pay attention to all of it at once, so the brain prioritizes as needed, filing some things away, bringing some to the forefront, putting some on hold and dumping others.
Pain in particular is your body telling your brain there is damage. Usually that’s an important message that gets prioritized, but sometimes your brain really is too busy to register it, like in the restaurant. So you don’t “Feel” the pain, until your brain actually gets the message, which is sometimes helped along by the eyes reporting the same thing (like the front of house manager).
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