When the nervous system is out of balance: Pain that spreads
[...] The brain's main task is to protect us from danger
The brain is the 'boss' with two 'assistants' who carry out the boss's orders in the body. One worker is the sympathetic nervous system, which we can call the 'body activist' because it stretches its nerve pathways through the body and increases the activity of breathing, of the bloodstream, the tension of the muscles that must be ready if it becomes necessary to flee or fight for protection.
The second collaborator is the parasympathetic nervous system, the 'body relaxer', which steps in when the brain thinks the danger is over. It dampens the activity and ensures that the body comes back into balance, that you can eat, digest food and sleep. It has a star player called the vagus, which extends between the brain and the organs of the body.
These two nervous systems make up the autonomic nervous system, and this is where imbalances occur when problems arise.
So why do you get pain?
The brain monitors everything that is going on and predicts what is going to happen based on previous experience. If you have had pain in the past when stressed by a certain cause, it will come again with every similar stress that the brain has in its statistics. It gives you a pain signal that means "stay alert!". Pain signals are the brain's important warning tools.
If the brain believes that you have been exposed to something dangerous for a long time, then the body activist can continue to work at full speed, the brain does not call in the body relaxer in the usual way. And now the brain goes into overdrive and starts over-interpreting even quite innocent stress and activates the pain. You may have difficulty sleeping and getting proper rest. The brain and nervous system are sensitised, extra-sensitive, as they say. [...]
