Gary BreckaHuman Biologist & Longevity Innovator

Your Fear Could Be Fueling Your Pain

5 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker challenges the traditional view that pain always stems from tissue damage. He explains that fear of movement can itself generate pain by triggering muscle spasms, tightening muscles, restricting joint range, and amplifying pain signals through neural circuitry. Drawing on clinical experience, he notes that many patients present with significant pain despite lacking any clear injury, and that their fear of moving—often rooted in a past incident—becomes the primary pain driver. The message emphasizes the importance of addressing fear-avoidance beliefs in pain management.

Chapters

You talk about the fear of movement sometimes being as bad as the injury itself. Yes. What do you mean by that, the fear of movement? Let's go back to pain science for a minute, okay? Because this is really, really important. We used to think that when someone was in pain, that was because there was a tissue that was damaged. And the only reason someone can have pain is because there's some element of damage there. We now know that's not true. We now know that there are many things that can cause pain. Now, one of these is a fear of movement. And fear of movement is something that triggers muscle spasms. It tightens everything up, it restricts the movements of your joints, and it's primarily driven by what's going on in the neural circuitry, and that drives pain up even more. I had many people come into the practice who didn't have any obvious injury, but they still had a lot of pain, and a lot of that was because they were so afraid to move from something having gone wrong a while ago. That was now the primary driver of pain.