(Photo by Žygimantas Dukauskas via Unsplash)
The occasional validation of clichés and other well-worn phrases by scientific studies is one of life’s unsung oddities if not glories. No one conveys an idea without words to hold them. In the curious case of pain, however, words do some impressive heavy lifting.
Clichés about pain are—and, sorry, this cannot be helped—painful. “No pain, no gain” is so standard, it now enters children’s vocabulary from an early age. “Get out of your comfort zone” implies just enough pain to count as discomfort. A music teacher of mine was fond of rephrasing this ever so gently as, “If you are not expanding as a person, you are contracting.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s commanding aphorism “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” pulled from Twilight of the Idols (1889) might as well be a cliché, except it makes the neat trick of distilling the essence of pain without using that very word. Plus, legions of commentators cannot help but invoke the phrase every time they want to remind us that pain and trauma have real-life consequences.
Thankfully, we have science to explain the mechanism. And science says that pain, done right, confers marked benefits. The trick, as in so many realms of life, is finding the right spot on the spectrum between what is chronic and what is manageable.
The operative scientific buzzword here is hormesis, also known as hermetic stress. As outlined in a bevy of online sources, such as in this one courtesy of Time magazine, the stress of pain disrupts the oxygen level in our cells, which is managed by the mitochondria most of us mapped out in our high school biology notebooks. Assaulted by stress, our cells produce a reactive brand of oxygen that, if our bodies work correctly, is mopped up by Nrf-2 proteins. Repeat often enough through vigorous exercise, extreme temperatures, or the manageable toxins contained in some foods, and you create a virtuous cycle that will improve your health. Mix and match these stressors, and you might even compound the benefits.
Scientists have amassed an impressive amount of evidence that some of these biological stressors—namely iron and copper—have contributed significantly to our evolutionary development as a species: “In humans, the ‘hormetic zones’ for iron and copper have been established, and dysregulation of iron and copper homeostasis are involved in a wide range of diseases including neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.”
Long before the use of chemotherapy and radiation to cure cancerous growths by also killing healthy cells, the first physicians were busy positing that manageable doses of toxins might result in paradoxical benefits and cures. Or, as Paracelsus said as early as the sixteenth century: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.” More than two centuries later, in 1797, Edward Jenner employed the analogous idea of infecting patients with milder versions of smallpox to prevent contraction of the same disease.
The broad view at work here is that anyone looking to avoid pain, discomfort, or stress in life is bound not only to experience extreme disappointment but probably also ill health on top of a crushing bout of depression. They are probably also bound to become unreasonable, even churlish people. We call people “childish,” in part, because they have not lived long enough to survive disappointment and pain.
The benefits of pain somewhere along the spectrum of chronic and manageable seem to point toward a new realm of education. In the spirit of teaching young adults financial management skills, perhaps we could call this new skill “pain management.” If we can hope that whatever does not kill us will not kill us, surely we must prepare ourselves for an increasingly brutal world in which pain is no longer objectively measured but subjective to the point that all of us might not only survive it but thrive in opposition to it. The sooner each of us finds our calibrated threshold, the better.
