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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · How to Combat Pain · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

That's exactly right, because thoughts and predictions trigger a biological cascade of events in the human body that affects systems throughout the human body, including our neurotransmitters, our hormones, our musculoskeletal system.

And thoughts and predictions can actually physiologically lower the brain's pain alarm.

When I first met Sam, he was 17 years old.

He had been in bed for four years.

He had long, unwashed hair.

He was pasty and pale, and he was rocking himself back and forth on my couch with the pain.

So he had been diagnosed with chronic migraine and diffuse amplified body pain of unknown etiology, meaning he had seen a bazillion doctors, something like 14 of them, and he had been on 40 medications, but nothing had helped, and no one really understood why Sam was in so much pain.

So by training, I've been studying pain neuroscience, pain biology, and pain psychology for 35 years.

But I think of myself really as a pain detective because it's my job to look at all of the biopsychosocial factors that are going into creating and amplifying the pain to see what I can do to help turn pain volume down.

So as I conducted an assessment of Sam, I quickly learned that Sam had been living with crippling social anxiety and suicidality for many years without relief or adequate treatment.

He was also sleeping poorly.

He was up playing video games until four in the morning and

He was on what I like to call a white food diet, which is not uncommon in America, where he was eating pizza, pasta, chips, and cereal, but he just didn't like fruits and vegetables, and so he wasn't eating them.

And what became clear to me was that if I wanted to help Sam, I needed to help him target all of the ingredients in his recipe.

Medications alone just weren't going to cut it, and of course they hadn't.

So I met with Sam and his parents and we introduced him to fruits and vegetables, one per meal.

We put Sam on a sleep hygiene protocol to help him improve his sleep.

And I put him also on a pacing protocol.

And we said before that pacing for pain is much like pacing for a marathon.

So what that meant for Sam, who had been bed bound for four years, was

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