No two people have the same pain threshold or tolerance. Both things depend on interactions occurring between your brain and nerves.

Pain can come in many forms. It can be from a headache, burn, accident, or some other cause. Your pain tolerance refers to how much pain you can handle, which is different than your pain threshold.

Your pain threshold is the minimum point where something, such as heat or pressure results in pain.

You may not realize that while you can’t do much to change your pain threshold, you can improve your pain tolerance. Keep reading for tips to help you with this.

1. Yoga

Yoga is an activity that mixes breathing exercises with physical postures, mental training, and meditation. People who engage in yoga regularly can tolerate higher levels of pain than those who don’t.

Individuals who participate in yoga also have more gray matter in areas of the brain related to attention, pain regulation, and pain processing.

2. Mental Imagery

While going to a pain management doctor is a smart strategy for extreme pain, sometimes you can increase your pain tolerance using mental imagery.

With this, you create vivid images in your mind. For example, you can imagine your pain as a red, hot, pulsating ball. As you imagine the ball, you can start to shrink it in your mind and change it to a cool and calming shade of blue.

This may help you mentally alleviate some of the pain you are feeling.

3. Warm-Up

For most people, everything is more painful if you are cold. Being cold makes you instinctively tense your muscles, be still, and hunch your shoulders.

Remaining still only reduces your body temperature more. You can prevent this by putting on layers or using a heating pad.

Doing this on the areas that are in pain can be extremely beneficial.

4. Biofeedback

Biofeedback is a unique therapy that helps increase the awareness of how your body responds to stressors and other stimuli, including pain.

During your biofeedback session, your therapist will show you breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, and other ways to override the way your body responds to pain or stress.

This therapy can be used to treat an array of physical and psychological conditions.

5. Physical Activity

When you are active, it will help to increase pain tolerance while reducing pain perception. In fact, a study showed that engaging in a cycling program helped to increase participants’ pain tolerance.

Effective Tips to Increase Your Pain Tolerance

If you are searching for effective and proven ways to increase your pain tolerance, start with the above-mentioned methods. Each of these has been proven effective and can help reduce the pain you feel, regardless of the source.

To find more helpful information and resources, check out some of the other blogs posted on our website. We cover everything from amazing science and interesting places to useful tips and crazy facts.