VLOG—A Minute with Steven

The Time I Learned Pain is in Your Mind

It’s Steve.

There’s been some keen interest in a prior video, “Do You Love the Pain?”

And I made the point in that video that pain is largely in your mind. So, I’m going to elaborate a little bit on that in this video.

Let me tell you about the time when I really understood that pain is very much in your mind.

I was a dumb and feisty, wild teenager and I got into a fight. And I got a big elbow in the nose, and that’s how I got this. Pretty badly broken nose. So, I was rushed to the emergency room at the local hospital. In the middle of the night I’m there bleeding, and gushing blood and it’s a big mess. And the emergency room doctors were working on me, he has his hands on my nose, and he’s just humming to himself, and then BOOM! Without any warning, he resets my nose.

It was good that he didn’t say anything, like; “Now, I’m going to do this and it’s going to hurt.” Because then I really would’ve freaked out.

But he was smart, without saying anything, BOOM.

He just planted his palms on my nose and reset it. And let me tell you the pain was blinding.

Okay, and I started freaking out but then I realized, hey, it’s over. His hands are no longer there, he has stopped pushing my nose around, and you know what the pain is pretty much gone.

I had to first get passed and remove the emotional and psychological reaction of oh my god, look what he did to me. And I realize okay it’s sore and it’s achy but the pain is pretty much gone.

And that queued me into all the times prior when I had felt pain and I realized a lot of it had to do with my emotional and psychological reaction to what was going on. And I learned that lesson and I carried it with me throughout my athletic and my martial arts career.

Now this is something that any martial artist or athlete or dancer or certainly soldier will tell you. They’ll tell about to what extent pain is in your mind. And if you can conquer it, if you can resolve the emotional and psychological issues you have with getting hit or hurt, then you will find very much that pain goes away.

Talk to you soon.