Tension Myositis Syndrome: A False Alarm
When I was in the thick of my chronic pain and fatigue, I remember feeling like I was standing at the bottom of a hole so deep, there was no way out. What I didn't know then, and what I want you to know now, is that a lot of chronic pain is neuroplastic.
It's real pain, generated by a nervous system stuck in a false alarm, not by damage or dysfunction in the body. That single shift in understanding is one of the keys to recovery. It doesn't have to be too complicated. We just need to get to what's actually driving the pain.
Sometimes pain is just an alarm going off when there's no real danger.
The one symptom I still occasionally have is my jaw tightening up. It feels like I’m clenching it, but I’m not. Writing and journaling were a big part of my healing, and when I had this symptom the other day, I started writing, which turned into this post. It got me out of pain, and I hope it helps you too.
Why does mind/body pain happen?
The root cause of most chronic pain is a signaling problem in the brain. It’s like when someone pulls the fire alarm, but there is no fire. When my jaw tightens up, or I feel a little pain, I know that my primitive brain is interpreting perfectly normal sensations as if there were an injury to my body. It’s just a false alarm.
A False Alarm, Simplified
As soon as our survival brain interprets those same sensations as safe, it reduces or stops signaling the pain.
This process can become a habit, and that is where the pain becomes chronic. This is referred to as Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). It is also known as chronic pain, Neuroplastic Pain, or Mind-Body Pain.
This includes chronic back pain, migraines, head pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, dizziness, itching, sensitivity to chemicals and foods, and almost anything chronic.
One important note: always get checked out by a doctor to make sure there is no structural problem or disease, but if you have been thoroughly evaluated and get a clean bill of health, you can be pretty confident you have TMS.
If There's No Danger, Why Does the Brain Still Signal Pain?
It's a fair question: if your body isn't in danger, why does your brain keep sounding the alarm? Normally, your primitive brain only sends pain signals when something is genuinely wrong…a real threat, meant to stop you from causing further harm. So if there's no injury, why the pain?
The answer is that your survival brain has been overwhelmed. It's received too many danger signals over time, and in response, it's shifted into overprotective mode.
Most of the time, these danger signals aren't physical at all. They're emotional: stress, unprocessed feelings, old patterns of high alert. And once the brain is flooded with enough of them, it can tip into fight-or-flight, treating ordinary sensations as threats, and firing off pain to try to keep you safe.
What Counts as a Danger Signal?
Emotional danger signals often look like:
Any ongoing negativity or perceived threat can push the brain into fight-or-flight, and once there, it's hard to find the way back to balance. It might be severe trauma, or just a hard breakup. What tips the scales differs for everyone.
As a retail manager, I pushed myself constantly, chasing perfection because I feared getting fired more than anything. I lived in near-constant fear and anxiety, running on an all-or-nothing mentality. It wasn't rational, but fear rarely is. And fear is fertile soil for chronic pain.
How to Retrain Your Brain to Stop Sending False Pain Signals
We now understand that TMS is a signaling issue, which explains why the brain perceives pain even when there is no physical injury. But how do we get the primitive brain to stop this habit of signaling pain when there is no injury?
Knowledge is key. We do it by understanding what happened, as I described above, and then undoing it.
I just stated that chronic stress or chronic negative emotions cause the brain to go into fight or flight, so it would make sense that stress reduction and positive emotions would help the brain feel safe, and they do.
That's the foundation, but understanding why the pain happens is only half the equation. The real work is in the how: the specific practices that help your brain unlearn the habit of pain and relearn safety.
I've laid out exactly how to do that, step by step, in my post 10 Steps to Retraining Your Brain Out of Pain. If you're ready to move from understanding TMS to actually recovering from it, that's the place to start.
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