The Most Important Thing You’ll Ever Have

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Inspiration: Episode #25: Waking Up of the Mind Your Body podcast with Dr. Nevo.

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TL;DR: Your pain isn’t broken. Your nervous system is protecting something valuable: you. The problem? Many people have lost awareness of their own worth, so their body’s protective response feels like torture instead of care. When you reconnect to what makes your life meaningful, you stop fighting your pain and start working with your body’s wisdom.

What You Need to Know

• Awareness of your self-worth is essential to understanding why your body fights so hard to protect you

• Pain intensity reflects what you’re protecting, not system malfunction

• Being “awake” means balancing awareness (knowing your value) with alertness (responding to threats)

• Your identity is not your pain. The fight is temporary, even when healing takes time

• Research shows threat perception affects pain more than actual injury intensity [7]

What Is the Most Important Thing in Your Life?

If someone asked you what matters most in your life, what would you say?

Your family? Your health? Your work? A dream you’re chasing?

Or a material possession you’ve worked hard for. An accomplishment. A career milestone. A relationship with your partner, children, or closest friends.

All of those answers are valid. They matter.

Here’s what I’ve learned treating thousands of people with chronic pain: none of those things matter if you’re not aware of them.

Awareness is your most priceless gift.

Why awareness matters: Without awareness of something’s value, you won’t experience its worth. An antique sitting in your garage is worthless if you don’t know what you have. The same principle applies to everything in your life, including your own worth.

You have a priceless artifact sitting in your attic right now, worth thousands of dollars. You don’t know what you have, so you use it as a doorstop. You donate it to a thrift store. The value exists. The worth is real. But not to you. Not until you become aware of what you have.

Bottom line: What makes something precious to us is our awareness of its value. This applies to everything in your life, including yourself.

How Does Pain Demand Your Attention?

When you feel pain, you become alert. Alertness comes from your drive to survive, to recognize threat, to find safety.

Pain requires alertness. With enough distraction, you might not even notice you’re in pain. I’ve seen this hundreds of times. A patient absorbed in conversation forgets their back hurts. Someone focused on a project doesn’t feel their headache.

Here’s the formula: Your pain experience combines what you feel and how you feel about what you feel.

The degree of suffering you have depends on many factors:

• Your limbic system sensitivity [1]

• Your past memories and experiences of pain

• Your cumulative stress and trauma burden

Your mind plays a central role by appraising how much threat you’re facing [2,3]. This translates into the intensity and unpleasantness of the sensation and the degree of suffering you experience.

Key point: Pain isn’t about what’s happening in your body. Pain is about what’s happening in your mind and what meaning you’re making of the sensation.

Why Your Mind Isn’t Your Enemy

I need you to understand something.

Your mind’s intent is survival. Your mind wants to establish safety as soon as possible. Without the awareness your mind provides, you couldn’t experience or connect with your own processes.

When you feel an emotion because of your pain (foreboding, fear, frustration, anger, sadness), you’re alert to the fact something is wrong. Your ability to sense internally picks up a signal implying threat.

The suffering you feel depends on the degree of threat you perceive.

How unsafe do you feel?

A nervous system perceiving threat goes through a finite list of domains aiming to protect and preserve life: fight, flight, cry for help, freeze, or shut down [4,5]. The thoughts and feelings fluctuate, manifest differently in your body, or vary in intensity from person to person.

Key point: These defensive responses aren’t the problem. They’re your system trying to survive.

The Flashlight in the Dark

To be alert depends on your state of awareness.

If you’re not aware, you can’t become alert.

Think of it this way. In a pitch black environment with a single flashlight, you can only see what the beam points at. You know there’s a reality outside that beam because of object permanence. But sometimes you forget this fact if you believe reality exists only within what you can see in that moment.

If all you can see is your pain, if that’s where your flashlight is pointed, then that becomes your entire reality. You forget that there’s a whole world outside of that beam. You forget that there are parts of you that aren’t in pain. You forget that there are possibilities beyond suffering.

The beam of your flashlight is your awareness, and where you point it matters tremendously.

The relevant question here is: what are you fighting for?

You don’t enjoy the feeling of pain, threat, or danger. You want to protect your body at all costs. But why? What makes your life meaningful? What values make it worth fighting for?

This question will have different answers for each person. For some, it’s obvious and simple—of course life is worth living, of course I matter. But for others, and maybe this is you, this question may cause a pause to actually ponder its implications. If you’ve been in pain for a long time, if you’ve lost touch with the things that used to bring you joy, you might not have a ready answer. And that’s okay.

The Disconnect That Creates Suffering

For those who don’t have sufficient awareness of their value—self-care, loving kindness toward self, self-compassion [6], self-esteem, a sense of self-worth—they’re not fully aware of the intrinsic value of their lives.

Their intuition recalls. That’s why the pain hurts so much. It’s fighting for something worth fighting for. But they aren’t fully consciously aware or giving proper attention or respect to their own value as an individual. Their unique strengths and characteristics that make them unique.

Each person inherently belongs as a basic human right. There’s no need to prove your worth. You don’t have to earn it through achievement or caregiving or being useful to others. You don’t have to be perfect, productive, or pain-free to deserve care and compassion and a good life. You belong simply because you exist. This can be especially hard to land for the people pleasers out there who have spent your whole lives making sure everyone else is okay, often at the expense of your own wellbeing.

So what happens?

There becomes a disconnect between the intensity of how hard you’re activated for protection—to combat threat, to find your way back to safety—and the recollection or realization of what you’re fighting so hard for.

This makes you feel that you’re suffering unnecessarily. It feels pointless. It feels like too much. It feels like your body is broken, like the alarm system is malfunctioning, like you’re being tortured for no reason.

But when you realize that the intensity of a dysregulated nervous system is tied to the drive to survive, you can learn to appreciate that your armor is aiming to protect you because you are worth protecting. The intensity is not a mistake. It’s not your body failing you. It’s your body fighting for you because at some level, your system knows that you matter.

When Pain Becomes Your Identity

For those who don’t take the time or opportunity to recognize their self-worth, who are not aware, they can get stuck in just remaining alert. Their entire purpose becomes the fight itself, becoming the pain and what they encounter while in a state of defense.

The appointments to go to. The nurturing. The empathy and support and attention they receive.

All of these things—the doctor visits, the treatments, the support from loved ones—are supposed to be tools to help you get back to your life. But they can become the life itself. Your identity becomes wrapped up in being the person in pain, the patient, the one who’s struggling.

They forget this is just a means to an end, which is to return to their lives without pain. They get used to a new normal of pain. Sometimes they forget to ponder: what would my life look like without pain? What would you be doing? Where would you be going? Who would you be spending time with? What dreams would you be pursuing? If you can’t answer those questions, if you’ve lost touch with that vision, then you’ve lost touch with what you’re fighting for—and that makes the fight so much harder.

We must be aware and alert.

We must become aware so we know the value and importance of being alert.

This makes being alert have meaning, a point, serve a purpose.

You end up honoring the system of pain as opposed to despising it, running from it, fearing it, or feeling it is your body failing you. When you understand that your pain is your body trying to protect something valuable—you—then you can work with it instead of against it. You can listen to it. You can respond to it with compassion instead of fear.

The Mind-Body Connection

As above, so below. As below, so above. The mind-body connection is not metaphor—it’s reality.

While the body has innate wisdom and is picking up on signals and patterns your conscious mind might miss, it is also heavily influenced and directed by your state of mind, attitude, awareness, and level of alertness. Your thoughts, your beliefs, and your interpretations shape what your body experiences.

When you’re “awake,” you are both aware and alert.

Aware + Alert = Awake

You need a healthy balance of both to be awake, which is to accurately interpret your sensations. When you’re awake, you can see clearly. You can respond appropriately. You can distinguish between real threats and perceived threats. You can honor your body’s signals while also guiding it towards safety.

Not just aware without alertness. Not alert without awareness.

If you find yourself running from pain or denying your condition, you need to raise the energy of alertness. Turn toward it. Listen. Ask: what is this pain trying to tell me? What does my body need? What threat is my system perceiving?

If you find yourself identifying as your pain and cannot see a life without it, you need to elevate awareness of your life’s value beyond pain. Reconnect with what matters. Remember who you are outside of this struggle. Envision what life could look like on the other side.

You aren’t your radar system. There is a means to an end. You are not your pain. You are not your nervous system’s threat detection mechanism. You are not the alarm. You are the person the alarm is trying to protect. Battles are fought for an end goal, a purpose, a return to an equilibrium, a sense of tapping into the value that you have, the ideals and goals that have been temporarily stunted by an injury or illness. And I want to emphasize that word temporarily—because even when it doesn’t feel like it, even when the pain has been there for months or years, things can change. Healing is possible.

What Makes It Worth the Fight

Recent research shows that predicted threat of impending pain affects perceived pain even more than the actual intensity of a noxious event [7]. Your brain has the capability to modulate the intensity and emotional response to pain. Pain is not merely a signal but a complex experience shaped by both body and mind, influenced by your emotional state, previous experiences, and cultural context.

This validates what I see every day in my practice. The mind’s interpretation of threat impacts pain intensity.

But here’s the hopeful part. Studies demonstrate that mindfulness-oriented approaches that enhance interoceptive awareness lead to sustained reductions in pain and improved function [8]. Lower scores on attention regulation and trusting subscales of interoceptive awareness were associated with higher levels of struggle. But enhancing these awareness measures through mindfulness produced meaningful improvements.

This is the first research to demonstrate that enhancing interoceptive awareness through mindfulness produces sustained reductions in self-reported struggle among individuals with chronic pain [8].

Your awareness is foundational to managing pain.

The Turning Point

I know many of you reading this are in pain right now. I know many of you are exhausted from the fight. I know many of you have forgotten what you’re fighting for.

And I want you to know that I see you. I understand. I’ve worked with thousands of people who are there right now.

What I’ve learned from witnessing so many healing journeys is that the turning point often comes not when the pain goes away, but when we remember why it matters that we’re fighting in the first place. When we reconnect to our worth. When we reclaim our awareness of our value. When we understand that the intensity of our nervous system’s response isn’t a malfunction—it’s a measure of how much we matter.

Don’t Lose Sight of What You’re Fighting For

I’ve spent years helping people understand that their pain is real and their nervous system is trying to protect them. The intensity of your protective response reflects what you’re fighting to protect.

When you cultivate awareness of your self-worth and the reasons you fight for survival, you can better navigate pain and suffering. You ultimately honor your body’s protective mechanisms rather than despising them.

Remain both aware and alert to stay awake.

Know your value. Recognize what makes your life meaningful. Understand that your nervous system’s intensity is proportional to what it’s trying to protect.

Your relationships—the people you love and who love you. Your passions—the things that light you up, that make you feel alive. Your contributions—the way you make the world better just by being in it. Your capacity for joy, for connection, for growth, for meaning.

All of that is worth protecting. All of that is worth fighting for.

You are worth protecting.

That’s not a platitude. That’s neuroscience. That’s the truth your body already knows.

The question is: are you aware of it?

Questions for Reflection

These are not questions with easy answers. They’re questions you’ll probably need to ask yourself again and again, questions that will have different answers on different days. But they’re worth asking because they point you toward waking up, toward that balance of awareness and alertness.

What am I fighting for? Not in the abstract, but specifically. What people, what activities, what experiences, what values make my life worth protecting?

Where is my flashlight pointed right now? Am I only seeing the pain, the threat, the problem? Or can I widen the beam to include what’s still working, what still brings me joy, what I’m grateful for?

Am I more aware or more alert right now? Am I disconnected from the signals my body is sending, running from the pain? Or am I so hypervigilant, so consumed by the threat that I’ve lost touch with what I’m protecting?

How can I cultivate both awareness and alertness? How can I stay awake?

Don’t despise your pain. Don’t run from it. Don’t feel like your body is failing you. Honor it. Listen to it. Work with it. Ask it what it needs to feel safe. And then gently, compassionately, remind it of what you’re protecting. Remind it of what you’re worth. Remind it that you’re on the same team.

Aware + Alert = Awake.

Stay aware of your value. Stay alert to the threats. And in that balance, stay awake to the fullness of your life, pain and all.

Key Takeaways

• Awareness of your self-worth is essential to understanding why your body fights to protect you

• Pain intensity reflects what you’re protecting, not system malfunction or weakness

• Being “awake” means balancing awareness of your value with appropriate alertness to threats

• Your identity is not your pain. The fight is temporary, even when healing takes years

• Research shows threat perception affects pain more than actual tissue damage [7]

• Mindfulness approaches that enhance awareness produce sustained pain reductions [8]

• You don’t need to prove your worth. You belong because you exist

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About the Author

Dr. Zev Nevo is a double board-certified physiatrist, chronic pain survivor, and founder of the Body & Mind Pain Center. He helps people with persistent pain rebuild capacity and confidence using an evidence-based, trauma-informed mind-body rehabilitation approach.

Listen: Mind Your Body Podcast

Learn & Join: Mind-Body Rehabilitation Community

Visit the Clinic: Body & Mind Pain Center

Medical Disclaimer

The information in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read in this article. New or changing pain symptoms should always be properly evaluated by a medical professional.

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References

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2. Aristi G, Hu L, Wang Y. Top-down threat bias in pain perception is predicted by intrinsic structural and functional connections of the brain. Network Neuroscience. 2022;7(4):1248-1269. doi:10.1162/netn_a_00275

3. Coghill RC, Sang CN, Maisog JM, Iadarola MJ. Pain intensity processing within the human brain: a bilateral, distributed mechanism. Journal of Neurophysiology. 1999;82(4):1934-1943. doi:10.1152/jn.1999.82.4.1934

4. Porges SW. The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine. 2009;76(Suppl 2):S86-S90. doi:10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.17

5. Schauer M, Elbert T. Dissociation following traumatic stress: Etiology and treatment. Journal of Psychology. 2010;218(2):109-127. doi:10.1027/0044-3409/a000018

6. Edwards KA, Pielech M, Hickman J, Ashworth J, Sowden G, Vowles KE. The relation of self-compassion to functioning among adults with chronic pain. European Journal of Pain. 2019;23(8):1538-1547. doi:10.1002/ejp.1429

7. Aristi G, Xue C, Xu L, Tan Z, Wang Y. Top-down threat bias in pain perception is predicted by higher segregation between resting-state networks. Network Neuroscience. 2023;7(3):1027-1045. doi:10.1162/netn_a_00315

8. Khoury B, Knäuper B, Schlosser M, Carrière K, Chiesa A. Effectiveness of traditional meditation retreats: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 2017;92:16-25. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2016.11.006