Brain Fact Friday: PART 2 on ”Chronic Pain and the Brain: It IS All in Your Head”

Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we cover the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (for schools) and emotional intelligence training (in the workplace) with tools, ideas and strategies that we can all use for increased results. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and educator with a passion for learning specifically on the topics of health, wellbeing and productivity, and launched this podcast to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results--whether we are a teacher in the classroom, or in the modern workplace. For today’s EPISODE #232 and Brain Fact Friday, I wanted to stay on the theme of chronic pain and disease as we prepare to speak with Dr. Ashok Gupta[i] next week, a well-known Neuroplasticity "brain retraining" expert who has spent the last 25 years researching the effects of the brain and the mind on chronic pain and illness. I have so many questions for him, and hope you will tune into this next episode where I know he will answer everything, and give us all a solid plan for how to move forward to live healthier, more productive lives with our brain in mind. After posting last week’s Brain Fact Friday, where we looked at chronic pain and the brain, asking “is it all in our head” I received many messages, including one from cognitive neuroscience researcher John Harmon, from EPISODE #170[ii] who added to our post on LinkedIn, saying that “most neuroscientists who study pain say it IS in the brain. And beliefs about bodily pain -- such as "I think this treatment will reduce my pain" -- are (obviously) in the brain also. There is a very real physical connection between pain perception and one's beliefs, emotion, attitudes and the rest of the mind.” He sums this all up saying, “If the mind (including pain and thoughts and beliefs about it) = a set of functional neural networks, it’s easy to see how the mind can either amplify, or dampen, pain -- via the two sets of FNNs (functional neural networks) either amplifying, or working to dampen, one another.” This shows me something I’ve thought about for years—that it does matter what we think about. Which brings me to this week’s Brain Fact Friday. DID YOU KNOW THAT “Negative thoughts cause your brain to immediately release chemicals that affect every cell in your body, making you feel bad; while the opposite is also true—positive, happy, hopeful thoughts release chemicals that make you feel good. Your thought patterns can also have long-term effects. Repetitive negative thinking may promote the buildup of the harmful deposits seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and may increase the risk of dementia, according to a 2020 brain imaging study in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.”[iii] (Dr. Amen, Your Brain is Always Listening. In the world famous physician Dr. Daniel Amen’s recent book that he published in the middle of the Global Pandemic, Your Brain is Always Listening, he affirms that it’s not just the thoughts we are thinking about our health and wellness that are damaging for us, but how we think about everything that we do. If Your Brain is Always Listening,[iv] it makes sense to me that it’s fed positive thoughts about our mental AND physical health just like what John Harmon said about “the real connection between pain perception and one’s beliefs, emotion, attitudes and the rest of the mind.” This is one reason why I don’t like sarcasm. I don’t think it’s funny at all to poke fun of yourself or another person for anything. I’m pretty serious about this, as it just hits a chord with me. If I ever hear someone putting themselves down in any way, I’ll mention it and say something like “well that’s not true” hoping it will switch that person’s mind from this practice that I didn’t realize until writing this episode could contribute to the risk of this person developing dementia later in life. It’s important what we think about whether it’s in rel