Christopher Ellis explains how the brain's pain center sits next to emotional regions, so your mood shapes what hurts. The biopsychosocial model, from 1977, shows pain comes from biology, psychology, and social stress together, not just tissue damage.
The part of the brain that it comes from is next door to the area responsible for emotions. So it's no surprise that your emotional state is going to have an influence on your pain. And that's what's known as the biopsychosocial model of pain. This has been proposed since 1977, this model, and it's been around for a long time, but it just somehow has not really made it to mainstream. We are still stuck with this dogmatic tissue is issue paradigm. So the biopsychosocial model looks at all the factors of what it is to be a human, the sum total of stressors on your body and mind that all can influence how we perceive pain, how, what is the context, how much of a threat is this? That's how it works.
