I’ve been becoming more skeptical that chronic pain I have is physically based. Contrary to the article, my best guess is that my psychological pain is not bei

I’ve been becoming more skeptical that chronic pain I have is physically based. Contrary to the article, my best guess is that my psychological pain is not being -expressed- as physical pain, but rather my physical pain is my mind’s way to -distract- me from the psychological pain that threatens to come to the surface. To see this, notice it’s pretty clear that we distract ourselves in all sorts of ways from psychological pain, i.e. smartphone, social media, hacker news. Physical pain just happens to be a very engrossing form of distraction that takes all your attention and focus. One can start becoming increasingly skeptical by monitoring how much time during the day you -actually- feel pain. For me, it’s maybe a few minutes, but that few minutes of pain explodes into “I have this massive problem” which produces thought loops and rumination, which are themselves very effective distraction techniques.