Dr. Rachel Zoffness
speaker
360 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Dr. Rachel Zoffness’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We've got psychological factors and we've got sociological factors.
And pain lives in the messy middle of all the things that make you, you.
Yes.
So the bio domain of pain is the one we've all heard the most about.
It's genetics and tissue damage, system dysfunction.
It's also diet, exercise, and sleep.
And those are all critically important when it comes to the experience of pain.
But what I want us to notice is
is that if we're only focusing on the bio domain of pain, which is what we do in Western medicine, we are literally missing two thirds of the pain problem.
So in the psych domain of pain,
We now know negative emotions like stress, anxiety, and depressed mood will amplify the pain alarm, while positive emotions like joy and happiness and relaxation and gratitude will lower the brain's pain alarm.
And in the sociological domain of pain, we have social and environmental factors, and that includes socioeconomic status,
access to care, race and ethnicity, social support or lack thereof, and our environment, which includes history of abuse and trauma.
Because trauma, it turns out,
doesn't just live in the brain, it also lives in the body.
And trauma and chronic pain are best friends.
And what's so fascinating and shocking to me is that we have known this science for many decades, but it hasn't yet found its way to medicine or treatment.
That's right, because we know that the parts of the brain that make emotions also make pain.
Every emotion we have triggers a physiological cascade of events in the human body that affects all of our systems.
So for example, when we get stressed or anxious,
Showing 181–200 of 360 · page 10 of 18
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