{"id":208,"date":"2020-01-03T10:58:03","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T10:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helpforhealth.com\/?p=208"},"modified":"2020-01-18T13:03:28","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T13:03:28","slug":"emotional-and-physical-pain-are-found-in-same-brain-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helpforhealth.com\/health-coaching\/emotional-and-physical-pain-are-found-in-same-brain-areas\/","title":{"rendered":"Emotional and Physical pain are found in same brain areas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of the brain get activated as when people feel physical pain: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study, these regions were activated when people experienced an experimental social rejection from peers. In another more real-life study, the same regions were activated when people who had recently broken up with romantic partners viewed pictures of the former partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This study was not done in order to promote acetaminophen and other analgesics as psychoactive drugs. Rather, the idea was to emphasize that over the course of evolution, our bodies decided to take the economy route and use a single neural system to detect and feel pain, regardless of whether it is emotional or physical. While it may be a good idea to take a pain reliever in the acute phase of feeling physical and emotional pain, no one is proposing this a long-term cure for dealing with hurt feelings and grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pain, of course, is always both a physical and an emotional experience. If I stub my toe, in addition to the physical pain, I am likely to be also angry or disappointed with myself or with someone else who is convenient to blame (Why did you leave that box in the hallway where I couldn\u2019t see it until I hurt myself? Now look what you\u2019ve done!!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking of blaming, I begin to feel annoyed when people who do these studies and also those that apply them clinically don\u2019t go far enough into the body: emotional pain doesn\u2019t just hurt psychologically; it hurts in MY body. These days, it seems, the discovery of a link between a brain region and a psychological experience gives the experience an aura of authenticity: now we know it\u2019s real. People sometimes say, upon reading or hearing that depression, anxiety, and many other psychological ailments have specific neural signatures, \u201cIt\u2019s not just in my head.\u201d Well, I agree, but the brain happens to be located in the head (maybe saying it\u2019s not just my imagination is more accurate?). Showing only brain activation for a particular experience \u2013 without acknowledging a corresponding activation in the peripheral nervous system and a corresponding felt sense in the body — doesn\u2019t do much to convince me that the experience is somewhere else than in my head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s the part that most psychologizing tends to leave out: the brain is massively interconnected with the rest of the body. There are direct neural connections via the brain stem and spinal cord. The circulatory and lymphatic systems also carry neurotransmitters (hormones and immune cells) that find receptor sites in the brain which feedback and modulate the links between brain and body. In this way, every cell in the body \u2013 every cell — is linked into the nervous system and as such, can be sensed and felt, whether or not we allow ourselves to be aware of this psychobiological fact (I feel better now, having said this in writing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a physical pain, there is an obvious link between the psychological experience of pain and an awareness of a physical location in the body. The pain seems to come from an elbow, or a toe, or a hip. Weirdly, we can feel the physical pain in that location even though most, but not all, of the processing is going on in the brain. The neural, blood, and immune pathways between brain and body are tagged with body location information, beginning in the spinal cord and with successively more specific tagging up through the brain stem and thalamus, each adding another layer of redundancy and complexity, until the experience becomes conscious and further identified as \u201cmine\u201d in the insula, parietal, and motor cortices. The marvel of the nervous system is that even though body sense awareness is largely a creation of cortical complexity, we feel in 3-D: the pain is \u201cin\u201d my knee, that object is \u201cout there\u201d in space, etc. No one actually knows exactly how acetaminophen increases the pain threshold: it may act specifically in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, or throughout this whole body network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, with this kind of logic, we can come back to the neural similarities between emotional and physical pain. If the similarity is not just in the brain but in the body, it\u2019s perfectly reasonable to ask: Where does an emotional pain hurt? If there really is an economy of pain networks that includes both physical and emotional pain, and if physical pain has a body location, then this simple syllogism leads to the conclusion that emotional pain must have a physical location in the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In what way might emotions be embodied? All emotions have a motor component. Even if we try to hide our feelings, there will be micro-momentary muscular activation. The anterior cingulate is located right next to the premotor area, which begins the process of forming an emotional expression in the body. The premotor area connects to the motor cortex above it, and then back to the specific muscles of expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n