Absolutely a simplification (kinda gotta do that when you look at the brain). Affects the part I wanna look at though.

I’m actually doing addiction research now too and think that addiction is similar to chronic pain in that it results in this increased affect — people with addictive disorders feel strong cravings they can not crave, they over emphasize the good feeling on the drug and perhaps most importantly they feel awful when withdrawing. Withdrawal causes increased sensitivity to pain and negative affect and likely drives addictive behavior.

Real interesting stuff

I think the reason there’s so much overlap between chronic pain, anxiety, depression, addiction… is because pain is, among other things, an emotion. More specifically it is an emotion driven by internal sensations.

To understand this overlap let’s take anxiety as an example. Imagine you are walking home and want to take a turn down an alley that will get you home faster. Your stomach drops, and you decide it’s best to take the long way. Here a sensory experience led to negative affect (anxiety) that turned you away from a bad choice. In an anxiety disorder however, an individual is hyper sensitive to changes in their body— this means that this negative affect/anxiety is likely to come up a lot more often when it’s unnecessary

In pain, a painful experience leads to a negative affective state, the kind that might make you feel awful, groan or cry. In a typical situation this negative affect might help you, it may, for example keep you from playing soccer when you should be healing. But In chronic pain we (just like anxiety!) become overly sensitive to signals in our body and we become a lot more likely to produce negative affect. This means instead of helping us chronic pain serves virtually no purpose. Right now the best way to address this cognitive/affective aspect of pain is through therapy or meditation but in the future there may be drugs that allow you to blunt these processes. This would mean that you could be aware of pain with out feeling bad because of it. Actually this has been achieved through deep brain stimulation in like 1 person… we’ll see where that goes.

Hope u enjoy my infodump. I’m obsessed with this (and further implications into how these affective systems play a role in social cognition)

Definitely an example of messy pain signaling. Pain can also generally increase sensitivity to pain or negative affect so being in consistent pain on your period might just make other pain more salient to you. There are some other reasons why visceral pain is poorly localized but it’s hard to get into in a comment

Yeah please don’t interpret anything I say as medical advice. If anything what I’m saying is not to trust the locality and quality of your pain. I have had an esophageal ulcer and thought I was having a heart attack.

Also (again don’t trust my advice and please go to a doctor if you’re concerned) it could be precordial catch syndrome (I experience this) or costochondritis.

Hopefully the research I do will help! Not to get to into it too much but what I want to do is understand how systems that represent negative affect (feeling bad) become disordered in addiction, anxiety and chronic pain. A lot of time chronic pain is a result of abnormalities in the brain that cause a persistence of negative affect… it becomes nearly impossible to not constantly think about your pain and feel awful. This is why cbt and meditation can be so helpful. I want to figure out how these systems that generate our affective awareness work.

I can’t speak much on the stomach contractions. I imagine they are a result of spasming muscles and your body wanting to get stuff out… BUT

As a pain neuroscientist I can speak generally on the pain felt in the stomach. Interestingly, visceral pain (pain of organs) is communicated to the brain with these really messy nociceptive (pain) paths. With this, descriptive location accurate visceral pain is not very evolutionary necessary. So visceral pain is almost never reflective of it’s quality or location. This is why bloat can burn and stomach ulcers can feel like you’ve been punched. It’s also why heart attacks (a pain causes by lack of oxygen) can feel like an elephant on your chest, a knife or a burn.