Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

Your Brain's Pain Signals: A Personal Story

17 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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1:10

In this first‑person monologue, Joanne Smith recounts a moment during an endurance event when her brain sent a powerful pain signal well before any actual tissue damage occurred. She describes how the brain’s warning surged, demanding she stop, yet the intensity faded quickly, allowing her to continue. Drawing on her knowledge of how the brain signals pain, she recognized the warning as a temporary alarm rather than an inevitable injury, and used that insight to push through the remaining ten miles. The narrative highlights the brain’s pre‑emptive protective role, the rapid fluctuation of perceived pain, and the practical benefit of self‑awareness in endurance performance.

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This is just an example of how incredible the brain is and how it can, way, way before any type of tissue damage or damage to the physical body can ever occur, the brain will alert by sending the messages of pain. And that happened really clearly in my body. And it's so incredible how quickly it can disappear again, how it can go from being so intense to being Pretty much non-existent. So that's exactly what happened with me, and it's a good job it did because I'm not sure I would have made it to the finish. Although I know, kind of, I've got to a point where I've observed and I know enough about this kind of thing that I knew that it was me, it was my brain was saying, come on, Jo, you're right at the back, you can see everyone but you can't keep with them. And it was literally just saying, what are you doing? What are you doing? Stop it, stop it, stop it. It was doing everything it could. to grab my attention, to stop me, but because I know what I know, I could like get through that knowing that there's no way that it's going to be here for the next 10 miles.