At some point in my childhood, I found myself having a self-talk conversation about pain. I can’t remember exactly what was happening, but I know whatever it was was difficult and physically painful. 

I had this realization that pain wasn’t some physical, tangible thing in or on my body. It was an electrical signal being sent from one area of my body to my brain, which was interpreting this event as pain. It wasn’t “real.” At least, that’s what my childhood brain decided. 

I proceeded to test this idea after my realization by seeing how hard I could pinch myself before giving in to that ephemeral signal sent to my brain. The next few minutes (and days) were experiments in whether the realization that pain was only a chemical reaction in my brain could inoculate against physical pain. 

Shocker – it doesn’t work like that. I still felt pain. There was always a point where I thought, “Okay, stop. This hurts.”

But I did learn something from that experiment: realizing what pain is allowed me to tolerate more of it. Telling myself that it wasn’t a “thing” in the world I could touch allowed me to feel that pain and continue hurting myself anyway.

Now, the health and sanity of this experiment can definitely be questioned. But I later learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea. 

It’s actually more than 2,000 years old and described quite well by the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. 

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

He goes on to argue that most of the things that happen to us in life we think of as “bad” are actually neutral. It’s our opinions of those events that determine whether they are good or bad, whether we’re hurt or not.

By teaching myself that this pain signal from my brain was a real thing, I removed (or at least delayed) the opinion that I was hurt and needed to stop pinching myself. It allowed me to push beyond my normal pain tolerance and endure more of it.

Let me give you another, less childish example. 

People who go into special operations selection (think Navy SEALs or Green Berets) don’t do it believing they’ll breeze through. No matter how hard they train and prepare, they know it will suck. It’ll hurt, and that’s by design. 

The goal in that environment isn’t to breeze through without feeling pain; it’s to endure the pain and keep going anyway. The cadre screen for people who can do that, because it’s often necessary in a real-world operation. 

If you’ve been shot and you’re stuck in the middle of enemy territory, you don’t get a sick day. You must accept the pain, the injury, even the very real damage you’ve incurred… And you have to get your ass out of Dodge anyway, probably while carrying one of your injured teammates out, too. 

They can do this, not because they are superhuman, but because they’ve trained themselves to feel the very real pain and keep going anyway.

So, yes, pain and injury are real. But how it affects us and our ability to perform—how it affects what we’re capable of—is often overblown by our opinion of that pain.