The Symptoms We Catch From Each Other

Have you ever spent time with someone who came down with a cold and, as soon as you heard they had gotten sick, started to notice a tickle in your own throat? Have you ever received one of the dreaded school emails notifying parents of a case of lice discovered at school and felt your scalp start to crawl? Or probably the most familiar one: have you ever watched someone yawn and immediately felt the irrepressible urge to yawn yourself?

We are all much more suggestible than we like to think. I witnessed this firsthand during my internship at the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles many years ago. Another intern was presenting a case in consultation: a client whose primary symptom was rashes — skin eruptions that appeared and disappeared without any clear dermatological explanation. As we sat in that room discussing the case, something remarkable happened. One by one, several of us started to itch. Not all at once, not dramatically, but unmistakably. People shifted in their seats. Someone scratched an arm. Someone else rubbed the back of their neck. Nobody said anything at first, and then someone finally did, and we all laughed — because there it was, in real time, in a room full of clinicians who knew exactly what was happening and couldn't stop it anyway.

That's the thing about suggestibility. It doesn't yield to knowledge. It doesn't care that you have a graduate degree or that you understand the neuroscience. The brain is doing something far evolutionarily older and faster than conscious understanding, and it is exquisitely good at it.

Our brains are constantly scanning our environment for information about what's dangerous, what's normal, and what's expected. When we hear, repeatedly, that a very specific and expensive chair is the only thing that can prevent those of us with desk jobs from developing back pain, that perimenopause necessarily means joint pain and brain fog, or that aging inevitably comes with debilitating aches and pains, our nervous systems take note.

A remarkable number of symptoms that we attribute to structural damage or biological inevitability are, at least in part, generated by the brain. Not imagined — generated. The distinction matters enormously. These are real sensations, produced by a real nervous system that has learned, through a process of well-intentioned but misguided protection, to sometimes predictively generate pain and other sensations in its best attempt to protect us.

Those of us who have treated chronic pain for some time all notice conditions that follow this pattern at a population level. Carpal tunnel syndrome surged through the 1980s and 90s in a wave so pronounced it tracks almost perfectly onto cultural anxiety about computers and office work — the rise of a new kind of labor, new fears about bodily harm, and a diagnostic framework that gave those fears a name and a home. We can see something very similar with chronic low back pain. Whiplash injuries show a pattern that correlates more strongly with psychological variables and legal context than with the severity of the underlying collision. Most recently, it is increasingly clear that many of the symptoms of long COVID may be due to this exact same phenomenon and can be eliminated through Pain Reprocessing Therapy.

One of my clients — a 71-year-old man who came to me having been told for years that his pain was arthritis and therefore only treatable through pain management — has largely eliminated that pain through Pain Reprocessing Therapy. He's not an outlier or an anomaly. He's someone whose brain learned a new story about the sensations in his body, and responded accordingly.

But here's what he told me, and what I haven't been able to stop thinking about: among his peers, talking about one's aches and pains has become a primary mode of connection. It's how people check in, show concern, signal that they're paying attention. It's how you establish that you're having a similar experience, that aging is something you're navigating together. His wife noticed it too. The language of physical suffering had become the social currency of their cohort.

This is not cynical. It's profoundly human. We are wired for belonging, and we will find ways to achieve it with whatever materials are available. If the shared vocabulary of a peer group is symptom-talk — if pain is what creates intimacy and recognition — then the brain, which is above all else a social organ, has every reason to keep producing it.

This is one of the functions that neuroplastic symptoms can quietly serve: they keep us legible to the people around us. They give us something to offer in a culture that isn't always sure what to do with the healthy, the recovered, the person who says — actually, I feel fine. Recovery, in this context, can feel like a kind of social defection.

We Were Built to Catch Each Other's Signals

None of this means we are weak, or foolish, or that our symptoms are somehow less real for having a social dimension. It means we are human — which is to say, we are a profoundly social species whose survival has always depended on reading the people around us with extraordinary precision.

For most of human history, the fastest way to know whether something was dangerous was to watch what it did to someone else. If the person next to you suddenly clutched their stomach, went pale, or couldn't use their hand — your nervous system needed to register that information immediately, before your conscious mind had time to deliberate. The individuals who were most attuned to the distress signals of others, who could absorb and mirror threat cues almost instantaneously, were the ones most likely to survive. We are their descendants. Our suggestibility isn't a flaw in the system. It is the system.

What's remarkable is how physical this attunement is. In RO-DBT — a treatment model developed by Dr. Thomas Lynch for chronically overcontrolled presentations — there's significant attention paid to the musculature of the face, particularly around the eyes and mouth. These muscles, it turns out, are not just expressive; they're communicative in a direction most of us don't think about. They are directly connected to the vagus nerve, the great social nerve of the body, which regulates our sense of safety, connection, and threat. When we see a genuine smile reach someone's eyes, or watch a face contort in pain, our own vagal tone shifts in response. We are not just observing — we are, in a very real sense, receiving. The body of another person transmits information directly into our own nervous system, below the level of language, below the level of choice.

This is why sitting in that consultation room at the Pain Psychology Center and hearing about a client's rashes was enough to make a room full of clinicians start to itch. This is why medical students reliably develop symptoms of whatever condition they're studying that week — a phenomenon so well documented it has its own name: medical student syndrome. This is why pain can move through a social group like weather — not because anyone is manufacturing it, but because nervous systems in close proximity are, quite literally, in conversation with each other.

Knowing this changes nothing about the reality of the sensation. But it may change everything about how we understand where it came from — and whether it has to stay.

Three Signs Your Symptom May Be Neuroplastic

If you're wondering whether neuroplasticity might be part of your picture, here are three categories of evidence worth sitting with. Not to dismiss what you're experiencing, but to get genuinely curious about it.

1. The symptom moves with your inner weather, not just your body.
Structural damage tends to produce consistent, predictable symptoms. Neuroplastic pain is more responsive — to stress, to emotion, to attention, to context. It may flare before a difficult conversation and ease during a vacation. It may migrate, shift character, or disappear entirely when you're absorbed in something meaningful. Does your brain fog lift when you're absorbed in something you love? Do your joint symptoms flare when you're anxious or in conflict? Does your back pain spike before difficult conversations? If your symptoms seem to have their own emotional logic, that's data.

2. There's a history of symptoms that traveled.
Neuroplastic nervous systems rarely produce just one symptom. If you look back at your medical history and find a trail — IBS, migraines, chronic pelvic pain, TMJ, fibromyalgia, tension headaches, conditions that came and went or morphed into each other — you may be looking at a nervous system that learned, early, to express distress through the body. Think about what is more likely: that you suffer from a range of different, difficult-to-treat symptoms that are completely unrelated, or that all of these symptoms might share an underlying neuroplastic component. A new diagnosis doesn't always represent a new problem. Sometimes it's the same pattern in a new location.

3. The story you've been told — and the fear it created.
This is perhaps the most underappreciated data point, and it deserves to be approached with compassion rather than suspicion. What did you hear about aging, or hormonal transition, or the kind of work your body does? Was it framed as inevitable decline? Did someone close to you have a difficult experience with pain that you've absorbed as a template for your own? We know that fear of the symptom itself is what perpetuates neuroplastic symptoms. When we approach a sensation with dread — bracing, catastrophizing, scanning — we signal to the brain that the threat is real and ongoing. The brain obliges. If your relationship to your symptoms is characterized by high fear and hypervigilance, that is actually excellent news — because it means that something you may have been told you simply have to live with is actually completely treatable.

Beyond the Identity of Pain

My 71-year-old client is not a miracle. He is evidence of something the research on neuroplastic pain keeps confirming: the brain that learned to produce a symptom can learn something different. Not through willpower or positive thinking, but through a slow, patient process of teaching the nervous system that the body is safe — that the sensations arising in an aging body, or a changing body, or a body under stress, are not emergencies requiring protection.

That process is harder when the people around you are bonded through shared suffering. It's harder when every conversation reinforces the narrative that this is simply what bodies do, that pain is the price of getting older, that the symptoms you're having are what anyone in your situation would have. It's harder when recovery means stepping outside a social world organized around illness.

But it's possible. And sometimes, the most radical thing a nervous system can do is decide that it no longer needs to hurt in order to belong.

Can chronic pain or other physical symptoms be influenced by social environment?

Yes. Research on neuroplastic symptoms shows that the brain can generate real physical sensations in response to learned patterns of fear, attention, and social context. These are not imagined symptoms. They are produced by a nervous system that has learned, through a process of protective conditioning, to generate pain and other sensations. Because the nervous system is exquisitely tuned to the signals of the people around us, social environment plays a meaningful role in both triggering and maintaining these symptoms. When pain or illness becomes the shared vocabulary of a peer group, the brain has a reason to keep producing it.

What are neuroplastic symptoms?

Neuroplastic symptoms are physical sensations generated by the brain rather than by structural tissue damage. They are real sensations, produced by a real nervous system. The brain learns, through repeated patterns of fear and protective attention, to generate pain, fatigue, rashes, brain fog, and other symptoms as a way of signaling threat. Because the brain is capable of learning new patterns, neuroplastic symptoms are also reversible. Pain Reprocessing Therapy and related approaches work by teaching the nervous system that the body is safe, which interrupts the cycle that sustains the symptom.

Why do symptoms sometimes spread through a group of people?

Human nervous systems are wired to absorb threat signals from others. For most of human history, the fastest way to detect danger was to read the people around you. That attunement is physical: the vagus nerve, which regulates our sense of safety and connection, responds directly to the facial expressions and distress signals of others, below the level of conscious awareness. This is why medical students reliably develop symptoms of whatever condition they are studying, why hearing about someone else's pain can produce a sensation in your own body, and why chronic symptoms can move through a social group without anyone manufacturing them.

Can social belonging make chronic pain worse?

It can, in some cases. When symptom-talk becomes the primary mode of connection in a peer group, the brain has a functional reason to maintain symptoms. Belonging is a fundamental survival need, and the brain will use whatever currency is available to meet it. If shared suffering is what creates intimacy and recognition in a given social world, recovery can feel like a form of social defection. This is one of the underappreciated reasons that neuroplastic symptoms can persist even when people genuinely want to get better.

How do I know if my symptoms might be neuroplastic?

Three patterns are worth examining. First, symptoms that move with your emotional state rather than tracking a consistent physical pattern — flaring before difficult conversations, easing during vacation, shifting location or character over time. Second, a history of multiple difficult-to-treat symptoms across different body systems, which may reflect a nervous system that learned early to express distress physically. Third, a high degree of fear or hypervigilance around the symptoms themselves. Fear of a symptom is one of the primary mechanisms that sustains neuroplastic pain. A clinician trained in Pain Reprocessing Therapy can help you assess whether a neuroplastic approach is appropriate for your situation.

Beyond the insight.

Knowledge is the first step; integration is the work. If you're ready to move these concepts into your actual life, let's talk about a strategic path forward.

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