A phrase you often hear from naturalistic doctors, and even physical therapists, is something along the lines of, “listen to your body, it knows what it needs.” The idea being that the human body is a font of internal wisdom, and sometimes it’s better to observe its calls than those of modern medicine. In cases such as repetitive strain, some will argue that any pain is a good reason to stop whatever you’re doing and give it a rest.

But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am of at least the absoluteness of this argument. Let’s presume the brain to be a computer which delivers sensations of pain (and fear) at any action it views as destructive (to the body). From the brain/computer’s point of view, there’s little downside to over delivering on these sensations. Let’s say the brain determines that touching a hot stone is bad, and then tries to figure the appropriate amount of pain to deliver to make you drop the stone. Why not double the amount of pain? It only adds more assurance that you will indeed drop that stone. You could say the same about fear. A person sees a sabertooth tiger and feels enough fear that they remove themselves from the situation. Again, the brain could ask, “why not double the fear?” It’s only going to get the person out of the situation that much faster.

Of course, you can have too much pain or fear e.g. so much pain or fear that it’s actually debilitating. If you pick up a hot rock and feel so much pain that it literally overwhelms you and you fall to the ground writhing in agony, well, that’s problematic for number of reasons, one being that predators could easily pick you off at that point. If you see a sabertooth tiger and immediately shit your pants and fall to the ground quivering, you’ll quickly turn into tiger food. Pain and fear need to deliver enough stimulus to make you deal with the situation, but not so much overwhelm you.

So we can kind of see the range that pain and fear need to operate in. They’ve got to be painful or fearful enough to get you to do something, but not so much that it overwhelms you. My suspicion is that this is a pretty big range. We’re often experiencing more pain and fear that we really need to, and that’s causing us unnecessary agonies.

So, my point here is that “listen to your body,” may not always be the best advice. There may be times when your body is essentially lying to you.