The Mel Robbins Podcast
Neurosurgeon’s Protocol to Feel Better Now: The Best Ways to Heal Your Body & Live Pain Free
16 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. You know, I don't know about you, but I tend to take my health for granted until I'm in pain. And right now I am dealing with this issue. It's in my shoulder. I mean, it's causing me so much like, oh, nerve pain. Now in the past, I would have felt helpless. I would have worried.
But this morning, I didn't because I knew exactly what was happening. I knew exactly what to do because of the conversation you're about to listen to right now. One of the world's most respected neurosurgeons and medical experts alive today is here in our Boston studios to reveal the new frontiers in healing, pain management, and how you can feel better in your body starting today.
And that's whether you're dealing with something that just happened like I am, or you've been living with an issue for a long time. There's a list of simple lifestyle changes that you and your loved ones can try for free that have been proven with research over time to eliminate chronic pain. Isn't that amazing? You're going to leave this conversation so much smarter.
You're going to feel hopeful. I'm so excited for me, for you, for the people that we care about, because my friend, world-renowned medical expert, neurosurgeon, number one New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is here to reveal the secrets 99% of people don't know about pain and exactly what to do starting today to feel better now.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you're here. It is such an honor to be together and to get to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because someone shared this episode with you, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
I can't wait for you to meet our guest today, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and learn the new science of healing your body, stopping pain, and feeling better now. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a board-certified neurosurgeon. He completed his residency in neurosurgery at the University of Michigan and serves as associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
and a professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine. For more than 20 years, he's been breaking down the biggest medical stories in the world as the chief medical correspondent for CNN, which is where Dr. Gupta and I met as colleagues, and then we became friends.
One of the things that I really admire about him is his commitment to serving and to seeing patients while he's doing all these amazing things. After the earthquake in Haiti and all the news coverage ended, for two years, Dr. Gupta was flying down on the weekends to continue to do surgeries there. And then he would fly back and be at work on Monday.
And when my dad needed a life-saving brain surgery at University of Michigan, Dr. Gupta, he's the kind of friend that was constantly checking in with me. He also turned down the invitation to become our U.S. Surgeon General because he wanted to continue working as a practicing neurosurgeon. And on top of all of that, he's found the time to write five New York Times bestselling books.
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Chapter 2: What is the main focus of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's approach to pain management?
Thank you.
Of course. And I am excited to see you after we were colleagues and friends at CNN. I am proud of the work that you're doing. I'm so excited for your new New York Times bestselling book, It Doesn't Have to Hurt. We're going to talk all things about living a pain-free life based on the research and the science. And I'd love to start by having you tell me
What could be different about my life if I take into account everything that you're about to teach us today?
Most people are going to have pain at some point in their lives. But this idea that it has to become chronic pain, that it has to last, that is where the intervention can occur. And I think we haven't spent much time talking about this. People develop acute pain, and for some reason, it persists. Hmm. It's like this memory loop just keeps getting played over and over in their brains.
And I think we've learned a lot over the last decade about how to prevent that from happening. So not letting acute pain, which most people are going to experience, turn into chronic pain. If I had to add a more to the title of the book, you always want longer titles, I would say it doesn't have to hurt as much or as long.
Oh, I love that. What is the difference between acute pain and chronic pain? Just for somebody like me who's not a medical doctor? Yeah, so acute pain is pain that you might feel in the moment.
You don't touch hot pan, hot, move your hand away, stubbed toe. Chronic pain is when it just lasts. So there's no ongoing insult or injury to your body, and yet the pain persists. People, they try and put a timeframe on it. So they say if you have pain like that every day for three months, at that point, it's considered chronic pain.
Okay.
If you have it sort of every other day for six months, you know, you sort of get the idea, but it's pain that just simply won't go away.
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Chapter 3: How can understanding the difference between acute and chronic pain help you?
It's your expectation that that was going to help. And when you expect something to help, it helps. Expectations and experience are inextricably linked. If you expect something to work for your pain, it's far more likely to work. It's far more likely to change your experience. And what is at the root of that is probably this endogenous opioid system.
You're just basically making your body create all these various substances that are going to make you feel better. One of the things I got really interested in, Mel, with regard to what you can do at home is meditation. I think a lot of people hear meditation, sounds good. I mean, I like to meditate every now and then. It relaxes me, chills me out, whatever, me too.
What I think has happened over the last decade is that these researchers have decided to really put it to the test and figure out how do we actually test the value of something like meditation? So there's these researchers at UCSD, Eric Garland sort of leads this team, and they created a really fascinating experiment. where they basically put these heating filaments on your arm, okay?
I did this experiment myself. These heating filaments are hot, really hot, just to the point where you're not getting burned, but you're almost at that point. Like if you were touching a really hot plate, you would drop it. And these are on your arm. Okay. And you sit there pre-meditation and they basically measure your pain scores and your unpleasantness scores, these two things.
And then you go through this guided meditation. And it's a very specific meditation. It's part of something known as the MORE protocol, which is mindfulness-oriented recovery enhancement. And you see how much did your pain scores and your unpleasantness scores drop.
Now, are you meditating while the thing's on your arm?
You're meditating while the thing's on your arm. You meditate before, and then you continue to meditate as you start to go through the experiment. What did you experience? So numerically, I experienced a drop in my pain scores from a 7.4 to a 2, and my unpleasantness score from a 5 to a 1.8.
Wow.
Very significant. And that was just purely meditation.
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Chapter 4: What are the common misconceptions about chronic pain?
I don't mean to suggest that that pain relief lasts forever, just like OxyContin doesn't last forever. But during the time that people meditate, they can drop their pain scores significantly. And that's just your mind. People really aren't sure why these things work. And it's hard to study. But what they do know from an outcome standpoint is that these patients are getting tremendous relief.
There's options out there. There's hope out there. But pain is the most mysterious sensation that we human beings experience. You've got to treat it that way.
Wow. Let's take a quick pause so that we can give our sponsors a chance to share a few words. And I also want to give you a chance to share this exciting information from Dr. Sanjay Gupta with the people that you care about. Everybody deserves to feel better. And this research and this information is going to help you and the people that you care about do exactly that. And don't go anywhere.
We've got so much more to dig into and to teach you when we return. So stay with us. Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are getting a one-on-one consultation and session with the inspiring and incredible Dr. Sanjay Gupta. So Dr. Gupta, what are the things that you wish people in pain knew? And what do you wish are the one or two things that you'd start doing right now?
We're going to get into like a lot of the protocol and like more specific stuff, but just a bit of... Like, here's the North Star of what's possible. Because you may be right now in a day-to-day life where you just think you're stuck with this back or you're stuck with this knee or you're stuck feeling like this forever.
You know, I preface all these conversations I have with patients with a reminder that, look, I don't want to say anything that's going to minimize their pain. Because I think when I say something like, All pain resides in the brain. I'm not at the same time saying it's all in your head. Those are two different things. And I'm saying this as a neuroscientist. But all pain is in the brain.
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Chapter 5: What lifestyle changes can help prevent acute injuries from becoming chronic pain?
I don't want that to sound minimizing, okay? But that is where pain is. Pain is in the brain. If your brain doesn't decide you have pain, then you don't have pain. And by the way, the flip is also true, which is the brain can decide you do have pain if For no reason, people who have limbs that are missing, they have phantom limb pain.
How could that be that it's not even there anymore and it still hurts? Or something known as chronic regional pain syndrome, which is basically pain in your hands or feet without any injury or any obvious trauma or anything. So, you know, I start there often when I talk to patients, just sort of reminding them of that, that for some reason,
No fault of your own, but there's this memory loop that is continuing to get replayed over and over again that's causing that pain. Let's address that in some way. Addressing that baggage as much as you're addressing the pain. I think one of the questions that I think a lot of people have is why? Why does the body do that?
Is it a glitch of our central nervous system to just keep playing those memory loops? If you talk to people like Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote this great book called The Body Keeps the Score, I think what Bessel would suggest is that there's something else that's probably happened in your life. And maybe you can't remember it. but the body keeps the score.
And maybe by addressing some of those things that perhaps aren't in conscious awareness for you, you're not thinking about day to day. Like you're not thinking about why you're, you're just, your jaw hurts. You're not thinking about why that might be necessarily. Trying to treat the symptom more than the cause. And you may not be able to identify the cause yourself.
Here's what I find super exciting about this. Because, you know, when I've been in pain, I want to defend it. because it feels very real. But if you could just open your mind to the possibility that maybe you don't need to fix your back or your leg or your neck,
may be that part of the solution is really addressing the memory loop that's playing in your head that opens up a whole different possibility and an avenue of treatment and pain relief that you haven't even considered. In fact, you write, I want to read to you from your blockbuster book, It Doesn't Have to Hurt. This comes from page number nine. The point is that the brain creates pain on cue.
from a vast array of stimuli, biology, psychology, social, emotional, environmental, even cultural. And just as we now understand that the brain can be nurtured, developed, and optimized at any age, there's growing evidence that the brain can also rewire itself in ways that change the neural circuitry for pain. Yes. Really?
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What is the MEAT protocol and how does it differ from traditional methods?
You're going to be the best judge of how to retrain your brain. And what I mean by that is that just simply paying attention to your pain and maybe even keeping a pain journal for a period of time to sort of... Wouldn't that make it worse?
Or does it make it better? Better because you're now starting to go, you know what? I'm going to stop assuming I'm in pain all the time and I'm going to start to notice when I'm not. Is that what you're doing? I think you're trying to find the things that are correlating with your pain. Oh.
Every time I talk to my mom, my back hurts a little bit.
Well, that may be your mom, not mine. I'm kidding, mom.
She watches your show. I got to say this.
We love you. You did a great job, mom. But that's going to cause you a lot of pain. He was just kidding. Can you give me some examples of what you've seen that have a correlation to when people's pain spikes?
Yeah. So, you know, sometimes it can be really obvious things. Some people are going to hurt more in the morning. Some people are waking up in the middle of the night with their pain. Is the pain worse in the morning or at night? What things make your pain better or worse? Besides medications I'm talking about, I always feel okay when I'm doing X, Y, or Z.
And starting to dig into those types of things. The point a little bit in terms of training the brain is that no one has really been talking about this. I'm not the first by any means. Guys like John Sarno, people have done this for some time. But the idea that it has largely been ignored looking at these other things. Maybe medications are necessary for certain things like migraine headaches.
There's new classes of medications, neuropathic pain. That can be, you know, that sort of lancinating, terrible lightning-like pain that you get in your arm or your legs. Some of those, you may need medications. But the idea that despite those medications, you continue to have chronic pain, what are your triggers for that?
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Chapter 7: What role does the nervous system play in the experience of pain?
Figuring out what those triggers are will, I think, be the first step towards training your brain. And I don't want to over- or under-emphasize the value of true brain training, whether it be meditation, whether it be virtual reality. I would say, look at the data. I mean, I'm not just telling you this, and I was a skeptic of this. You know, I'm a neurosurgeon.
I'm the guy who opens the head and, you know, does things to the brain. The idea that meditation could cause these changes. We now know meditation objectively and measurably changes your brain. It causes thickening in certain areas of the brain that help reduce chronic pain. Okay.
So there is really active brain training that can help you in the moment and help decrease your pain long-term as well. And these are all within your reach. I mean, you don't have to go to some fancy clinic to be able to do a lot of this.
You know, so many people deal with back pain. Are there things that you found in all this research that are kind of top of the list to lessen back pain, Dr. Gupta?
If you've, you know, again, get it checked out. I mean, I evaluate a lot of back pain, make sure there's not a structural problem like our friend Rich Roll had, something like that. Let's say you've looked at everything and they say, hey, all your scans and everything are normal, which is what happens 90% of the time when I see a patient, x-rays, MRIs, all that sort of stuff.
Then I think, you know, really understanding that the back is something that I think a lot of people will rest in response to pain. They sit a lot. And when you're sitting, you're basically axial loading that part of your spine a great deal. So despite the fact that you told the rest, I'm going to sit down instead of stand, that's probably making it worse.
And I think as a general rule, sort of applying the same meat protocol for this, the mobilization, the exercise, and reminding yourself that there's nothing toxic happening in my body. People will say, I don't want to go for a long walk or do something like that. My back hurts. I'm going to damage it more. No, you're not.
If you've already checked that out and you can check that part off the list, like you're not damaging your back to go for a walk, then when you actually go for a walk or actually get mobile, you are probably going to actually help relieve your pain. Think about recruiting those healing molecules to actually go to the site of your pain and help.
Chill out those nociceptors, decrease the amount of transmission going to your brain and help you feel better.
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Chapter 8: How does addressing mental health impact physical pain?
Yes. You know, for a lot of people, there's different reasons for it. But one thing I would say is the numbers have gone up pretty significantly over the last couple of decades.
Yeah.
Why would that be? We're not eating different foods necessarily. Like why would our jaws be hurting a lot more? And I think it goes back to many of the same things that are driving a lot of disease in our country. Again, you think of heart disease, you think I'm eating too much meat. Yeah, maybe to some extent, but there's also the stress that you live in.
People who are socially isolated have more heart disease. What's the relationship there? Even if they're healthy eaters, we find that isolation triggers pain centers in the brain. My point being that there's lots of things that could be sort of driving the TMJ and many of the ills of our society. are the same things that are driving chronic disease drive chronic pain.
So getting to the root cause, you clearly had some root causes with regard to the amount of stress and everything else in your life. I don't know if you saw someone who's a specialist to deal with that part of your life Maybe you did. But if you did, the idea that you're doing it because you want to fix your jaw, right? I want to fix my pain. So I'm seeing a psychologist.
I love this paradigm shift that you would go work on your mindset and work on your stress levels and work on your resilience. And that would cure your jaw pain.
Yeah. Yeah, or greatly mitigate it. I mean, none of this stuff has gotten much attention. You know, that's the thing is that people wonder why these pains are increasing and why they're lasting longer. And I think it's because one of the fundamental things driving it has not really been addressed. We want the home runs. We want the knockout punch. That's what we want in society.
Like you get rid of my jaw pain right now.
I don't want this anymore. Because I got to get back to work. I got to get back to work. And then I got to go do that thing.
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