Why Turning Toward Pain Helps You Heal

The Safest Place

I once heard Frank Ostaseski, Buddhist teacher and co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, tell a story of teaching a group in rural Idaho. Ostaseski was teaching about how our natural inclination is to try to get rid of our pain and discomfort, even though we can learn a tremendous amount from training ourselves to turn toward it instead. Upon hearing this, a man in the group unexpectedly blurted out, "It's like telephone poles!" Ostaseski could not begin to fathom what this meant and asked the man to explain.

The man said he had spent his career laying telephone poles, which it turns out are about 40 feet tall, extremely heavy, and quite unsteady when you first place them in the ground. His very first day on the job, he was training with an old timer who had been laying telephone poles for many years. He told the old timer that if they placed a pole and it started to sway, he was going to run as fast and far as he could in the opposite direction. "Oh, you don't want to do that," the old timer responded sagely. He explained that if the pole started to fall, the very safest place to be was to go right up to it and put your hands on it. "It's the only way you'll know which way it's moving."

As someone who spent many years running from my own pain, hoping desperately that it wouldn't come crashing down on my back, there is a powerful lesson here. True safety and healing come from learning to turn toward our own pain and attend to it with care.

The Instinct to Run, and Why It Backfires

Our nervous system didn't evolve for nuance. When it registers pain, physical or emotional, its default move is to get us away from the source as fast as possible: fight, flee, freeze, distract, numb. This is our oldest wiring, older than language, built for a world where pain reliably meant immediate danger: a predator, an injury, a threat to survival. In that world, escape wasn't just reasonable, it was the whole point. The nervous system that ran fastest from danger was the one that survived to pass on its DNA. As I always tell my clients: our ancestors were the humans who were best at assessing and escaping threat.

That wiring still serves us very well for acute pain. If I break a bone, everything in me that instinctively wants to get out of the pain (seeing a doctor, immobilizing it, refusing to touch it) is helping protect me. The strategy matches the problem: the threat is real, immediate, and fixable by escaping it.

But chronic pain and emotional pain don't play by those rules. There's no predator to outrun, no single injury to protect. Still the same ancient alarm keeps firing, warning us to escape a threat that isn't actually there in the way it once was. Treating chronic pain or emotional pain like acute pain (fighting it, fleeing from it, trying to out-think or out-avoid it) doesn't calm the alarm. It confirms the alarm was right to go off in the first place, which only wires the threat response in deeper.

An emotion or sensation we avoid doesn't get the chance to be evaluated by the brain as safe. It stays filed under threat. Every time we flinch away, distract, numb, or argue ourselves out of feeling something, we confirm to our own nervous system that the feeling was in fact dangerous enough to require an exit. The alarm doesn't get resolved; it gets reinforced. This is the paradox at the center of a great deal of the work I do with clients every single day: the very thing that feels like protection is often what keeps the threat response switched on.

Turning toward the emotion or the sensation (attending to it, staying with it, caring for it) works differently. It gives the nervous system new information. It says: I can be with this. It's survivable. Every single time we stay with our pain instead of running from it, we provide a corrective experience for our nervous system. A system that receives that message enough times gradually recalibrates what it perceives as a threat.

Where This Meets the Body

There's now literal evidence for this, not just in the nervous system's threat response but in the body's own healing machinery. In a study published this week in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Bar-Ilan University induced a small, temporary patch of inflammation on people's skin, then had them either focus their attention on the sensation or watch a distracting video [1]. The group who paid attention showed a smaller, faster-resolving inflammatory response, with swelling and redness measuring about a third smaller and the two groups' responses beginning to diverge within minutes. The researchers framed the finding as evidence that what we consciously feel in the body plays an active role in regulating it, rather than simply reporting on it. It's one of the first pieces of evidence that where we place our attention doesn't just change how pain feels; it may change the body's actual physiological response to it.

Avoiding a sensation, guarding around it, trying to figure it out, catastrophizing about it: all of these are the body's version of running from the swaying pole. And just as with emotion, the way out is often the counterintuitive one: turning attention toward the sensation with curiosity rather than alarm, observing rather than fleeing, is part of how the brain is given the evidence it needs to downgrade the threat. A nervous system with fewer emotional alarms ringing in the background has, quite literally, one less source of chronic activation feeding into physical pain.

Turning Toward Without Spinning In

When I first learned this concept, I mistook it for dwelling on my own pain, and I wanted no part of it. "Turning toward" your pain can sound, at first, like an invitation to dwell on it, but there's a real difference between attending to our pain and ruminating on it. Rumination is thinking. It replays the story, searches for what went wrong, tries to assign blame, rehearses the injustice, searches for a solution, tries to think its way to a different outcome. Rumination is mental activity organized around the content of the pain: the who, what, and why.

There's an old Buddhist teaching that captures this same instinct. The Buddha tells a story of a man who is shot with a poisoned arrow, and before he'd let anyone treat the wound, he insisted on knowing who shot him, what caste the archer belonged to, whether the bow was long or short, what the arrow shaft was carved from, whose feathers fletched it. He died still asking. He never tended to the actual wound because he was too busy interrogating its origin.

We do this with our own pain constantly. Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve it? Who's to blame? When will it end? What will I do if it doesn't end? These aren't neutral questions; they feel urgent, even necessary. But like the man with the arrow, we can spend so long trying to trace the pain back to its source that we never actually get around to caring for the wound itself.

Turning toward our pain means attending to the felt experience of it, in the present moment, with as little storyline as possible. It asks: Where do I feel this in my body? What is its texture, its temperature, its edges? Can I stay here for a few breaths without needing it to be fixed? Responding with gentle care and curiosity settles the nervous system; responding with urgency keeps it activated. Putting our hands right on the telephone pole, even as we wish to turn and run, is actually the safest place to be.

Care as the Safety Signal

When we start to feel fear or anxiety, rather than trying to push it away, distract ourselves, or judge the experience, we can practice turning toward the emotion and caring for it, the way we would a crying baby. You can experiment with gently placing a hand on your heart or your cheek and saying to yourself, "I care about this suffering," or acknowledging, "This moment is really difficult." Just as a child feels her mother's tenderness and feels safe enough to calm down and stop crying, your own tenderness will help calm difficult emotions.

There's a substantial and growing body of research on self-compassion (much of it associated with researchers like Kristin Neff and Paul Gilbert) showing that self-directed warmth measurably down-regulates physiological threat responses. Tone, quite literally, changes physiology: a soothing internal voice engages different systems than a critical or panicked one, with effects on heart rate variability, cortisol, and subjective distress. The instruction to speak to your own pain the way you'd speak to a frightened child is the real work itself. In fact, there's a substantial body of research suggesting that the particular therapy modality may matter less than we think, and what matters most is learning to turn toward our own experience with care and warmth.

A Short Practice

Bring to mind something mildly difficult happening for you right now. Something small: a worry, a friction, a bit of dread, rather than your biggest pain.

Notice where it shows up in your body: the physical signal itself, a tightness, a heaviness, a flutter.

Now, instead of pulling away from that sensation, imagine placing your hands right on it, the way the old timer placed his hands on the swaying pole. There's no need to stop it or fix it. Just stay in contact with it, steady, while it does whatever it's going to do.

You might rest an actual hand on your heart or your cheek here, and offer yourself something simple: I care about this. I can be with this.

Stay for a few breaths. Notice whether anything in the intensity shifts. Staying with it long enough is often what allows it to settle on its own.

In May, my youngest brother passed away suddenly. The pain and grief have been immense. I last held his hand on a Sunday, before we got to push his body down the hall to the operating room, where he was able to donate his liver to a man his age who will now get more time with his family. As I write this on a Sunday three months later, the waves of grief and of missing him are strong. In previous seasons of my life, I would have tried to turn and run, scared that my heart wouldn't be able to handle the pain, hoping that I could somehow outrun the pain and that it wouldn't crash down on my back. These days, though, I know the safest possible place is to turn right toward the pain, putting my hands on it, knowing that my grief is a measure of my love and that my heart is big enough for all of it.

The pole sways less, eventually, once it's set. So do we.

Why does turning toward pain help you heal instead of avoiding it?

Avoiding pain, physical or emotional, tells the nervous system that the sensation is dangerous enough to require an escape. That confirms the alarm instead of resolving it. Turning toward the sensation and staying with it gives the nervous system new information: that the feeling is survivable. Over time, that repeated experience helps the brain recalibrate what it treats as a threat, which is why turning toward pain, rather than running from it, tends to support healing more than avoidance does.

What is the difference between turning toward pain and dwelling on it?

Turning toward pain means attending to the felt, present-moment experience of a sensation or emotion: where it sits in the body, its texture, its intensity, without needing to fix it. Dwelling, or rumination, is different. It is mental activity organized around the story of the pain: replaying what happened, searching for who is to blame, or trying to think your way to a different outcome. Attending to a sensation calms the nervous system. Rumination tends to keep it activated.

Can paying attention to physical pain actually change how fast the body heals?

New research suggests it can. A 2026 study in Nature Human Behaviour induced a small, temporary patch of skin inflammation in volunteers, then had them either focus attention on the sensation or watch a distracting video. The group who paid attention showed a smaller, faster resolving inflammatory response than the group who looked away. It is early evidence that where we place our attention may influence the body's physiological response to injury or irritation, not just how that response feels.

What is a simple practice for turning toward a difficult emotion?

Bring to mind something mildly difficult, not your biggest pain, just something with a bit of an edge to it. Notice where the sensation shows up in your body rather than the story behind it. Instead of pulling away, imagine placing your hands on it the way you would steady a swaying object, with no need to fix or stop it. You can rest an actual hand on your heart or cheek and offer yourself something simple, such as telling yourself you can be with this. Staying for a few breaths is often enough for the intensity to begin to settle on its own.

Why does chronic pain feel like an emergency even when there is no immediate danger?

The nervous system's threat response evolved for acute, fixable dangers: a predator, an injury, a threat to survival. Chronic pain and ongoing emotional pain do not resolve the way an acute threat does, but the same ancient alarm keeps firing anyway. Treating chronic or emotional pain the way we would treat an acute injury, by fighting it, fleeing it, or trying to think our way out of it, does not calm that alarm. It tends to confirm to the nervous system that the alarm was right to go off, which wires the threat response in deeper over time.

How does self-compassion help calm a difficult emotion in the moment?

Research on self-compassion, including work associated with researchers Kristin Neff and Paul Gilbert, shows that self-directed warmth measurably down-regulates the body's physiological threat response, affecting measures like heart rate variability and cortisol. Speaking to your own pain the way you would speak to a frightened child, gently and with care, is not a soft add-on to the real work of healing. It engages a different physiological system than a critical or panicked internal voice does, which is part of why practices like placing a hand on your heart and offering yourself a simple, caring phrase can measurably calm a difficult moment.

References

1. Mizrachi N, Rottem M, Rozenkrantz L. Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans. Nature Human Behaviour. 2026:1-12.

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