Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

Brain's Amazing Ability to Heal Chronic Pain

28 Feb 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:21

In this YouTube monologue, Joanne Smith explains how the brain can both generate and extinguish pain and symptom signals. She describes the brain’s innate ability to “switch off” chronic pain when equipped with accurate knowledge and understanding. Joanne shares her own experience of overcoming chronic ocular visual migraines with aura, noting that she has been migraine‑free for almost a year. She emphasizes how this relief has transformed her daily life, allowing her to run without heavy sunglasses, ski in bright snow, and enjoy mountain views without fear of light‑sensitivity. The narrative highlights the rapid, reversible nature of pain suppression and the profound quality‑of‑life improvements that follow.

Chapters

The brain, whatever it's decided to do to protect you, it's got some very amazing ability to turn it on, but it also has the same amazing ability to switch off these pain signals and symptom signals, to switch them off entirely. And that can happen amazingly quickly with the accurate knowledge and understanding. So yeah, yeah. And I have firsthand experience of that happening with many, many of my symptoms too. Migraines being one of the really, really big ones that I'm so incredibly over the moon about. The fact that I no longer have chronic migraine is just like life-changing. Especially when I can go out running without wearing big sunglasses. And going— it was just so nice being able to go in snow and skiing. And not being worried about the brightness. It was absolutely amazing to be able to see and look around and actually enjoy the view from the mountaintops and not, not have to be worried about that. It was just so good. It really tested— like, I've been almost a full year. In May, it'll be a full year since I've had an ocular visual migraine with aura.