Is there no limit to the amount of pain the brain can perceive? Can your body get used to the pain to any extent? In movies, I always see people react in the same way to injuries that range from the most serious to the horrible and dreadful. In other movies, there are people who simply ignore what seems to be an extremely painful experience. Are any of them based on any kind of science? Is there no limit to the amount of pain the brain can perceive? Can your body get used to pain to any extent? Pain tolerance is the maximum level of pain a person can tolerate. Pain tolerance is different from the pain threshold (the point at which you start to feel pain). The perception of pain that comes with pain tolerance has two main components.
The first is the biological component, headache or itchy skin, which activates pain receptors. Second, there's the brain's perception of pain: how much time is spent paying attention to pain or ignoring it. The brain's perception of pain is a response to signals from pain receptors that detected pain in the first place. The pain threshold is the minimum intensity with which a person begins to perceive, or feel, a stimulus as painful.
Pain tolerance is the maximum amount or level of pain a person can tolerate or endure. We feel pain because of the signals sent by our sensory receptors, through nerve fibers, to the brain. Tolerance and pain threshold vary from person to person. Both rely on complex interactions between nerves and the brain. The pain threshold is defined as the maximum level of pain a person can tolerate before it becomes uncomfortable, at which time the force applied should be pleasant and not painful.
The above-mentioned literature suggests that people who self-harm may have a higher tolerance and pain threshold than people who don't self-harm, but it has focused exclusively on samples from hospitalized patients. or of people with BPD. This hypothesis has not been tested in community samples despite high rates of NSSI among the university population. The purpose of the present study was to examine pain threshold and pain tolerance in a sample of university students with a history of NSSI compared to controls, in order to determine if the above findings can be generalized from the inpatient and BPD population to a sample of non-hospitalized patients.
It was hypothesized that participants who self-injured would have a higher tolerance and pain threshold, and lower pain indices than those who did not self-harm. In addition, it was hypothesized that participants who self-harmed would report more frequent dissociative experiences, higher rates of depression, higher levels of hopelessness, more frequent suicide attempts, and higher levels of anxiety.