Joanne Smith explains how your brain can create pain out of thin air when it expects something is wrong, even without tissue damage. Notice when your symptoms happen: same time of day, same movement, same situation. That pattern might mean your body learned to react, not that something is actually injured.
So, a way of looking at this is, if you've ever said to yourself, every time I do this, this is what happens, every time I bend over to pick this up, this is what happens, or every time I run— I've heard this one so many times— every time I run downhill, my knees hurt, that's a big one that I hear a lot, this one's for you, this one's for you. Because there is a chance that you could be experiencing a conditioned response here. So the first question is, just notice if your symptom or whatever you're experiencing is showing up on a pattern, like at the same time of the day every day, or with certain movements that you're doing, or in specific situations. Um, just notice that, um, and now I'll kind of do my best to break it down a little bit further for you. So the brain has learned to create the symptom out of thin air in certain situations. It can do that. Um, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong. This is where it gets really interesting. But it does expect that something's wrong.
