The Nervous System: A Self-Help Book for Protection

For thousands of years, the human nervous system has had one overriding task: protection. Our ancestors survived because their bodies learned to react quickly to potential danger. If there was a rustle in the grass, it was safer to assume predator than breeze. Protection first, questions later.

That protective bias is still with us today. Pain is not imagined. It is biological, involving nerves, spinal cord processing, immune signalling, and brain networks for evaluating threat. But biology doesn’t just send signals, it organises them into a kind of narrative, turning past experiences into a self-help book for protection from harm.

Every person’s book is unique. Some chapters are dramatic: an injury, surgery, a frightening diagnosis. Others are quieter but no less powerful: years of stress without support, early experiences of not feeling safe, or relationships that left lasting hurt. And sometimes, healthcare itself adds heavy chapters, an alarming scan report, worst case predictions, or dismissive consultations. Each experience is written into the body’s manual for protection.

Like any self-help book, some of the advice inside is helpful: rest while healing, avoid lifting during acute injury, slow down when the body needs it. But other passages are exaggerated, outdated, or misleading: your back is fragile, pain always means damage, movement will make this worse. The nervous system does not separate helpful sentences from unhelpful ones, it reads them all as truth.

When followed uncritically, this manual can keep people stuck. Protection, once useful, becomes over emphasised, keeping the body tense and alert long after the threat has passed. It is like a smoke alarm that once saved the house, now ringing for toast. The alarm still works, but its story about danger has grown louder than reality.

This shift in perspective is at the heart of moving from pain management to recovery. Management implies coping with symptoms indefinitely. Recovery begins with understanding that the nervous system is not broken, but overprotective, and that its self-help book can be revised. Some chapters remain true and useful. Others can be questioned, updated, or rewritten.

At Rewrite Pain, this is where the story begins: helping clinicians and patients recognise that pain is a narrative of protection, sometimes accurate, sometimes exaggerated, always written with the intent to keep us safe.