49 Things People Said Really Hurt Them Despite Their High Pain Tolerance

Physicians have long noticed wide disparities in the pain tolerance of the people they treat. Among patients with the same condition, pain ratings typ­ically range from “no pain” to “the worst pain imaginable.”

And although some disorders are more painful than others, the variation in distress among individuals with the same physical malady is far greater than the difference in the discomfort people feel, on average, from one condition to the next. “Two soldiers may be shot in the same nerve,” says Stephen G. Waxman, a neurologist at Yale University and the Veterans Administration Connecticut Health Care Center. “One has sensory loss but is otherwise okay; the other has intractable burning pain.”

One reason pain is so difficult not only to experience but also to talk about is that scientists still don’t fully understand how the body perceives and regulates it.

That picture has become slightly clearer in recent years, largely thanks to the 2021 Nobel Prize-winning discovery of temperature and pressure receptors in the skin that trigger the neurological signals we recognize as acute pain.

Chronic pain, however, has always been more complicated. The links it shares with conditions such as mental health disorders suggest that its origins are far more complex than previously thought.

Since it’s pretty much impossible to go through life without experiencing pain, you might feel unlucky if even minor injuries or discomfort seem to hit you particularly hard. But science suggests that exercise can help increase your pain tolerance.

Using data from a large Norwegian population study of 10,732 adults, researchers at the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsø analyzed participants’ self-reported activity levels and pain tolerance, which was measured by having them submerge their hands in ice water and rate their pain. The respondents were surveyed twice, roughly eight years apart.

The researchers found that people with more active lifestyles tended to have higher pain tolerance. What’s more, the more participants reported exercising over the course of the study, the greater their capacity for enduring pain became. When both survey periods were considered, those who had increased their physical activity during the interim years also reported higher pain tolerance over time.