Your Body Just Set Off a Fire Alarm
Apr 21, 2026
But Is It Actually an Emergency?
Imagine you're sitting in your apartment and the fire alarm goes off.
It's loud. It's jarring. Your instinct is to move — fast.
But here's a question worth asking AFTER you bolt for the exit: is there actually a fire? Or did somebody burn toast in 4B? Are you actually in danger? Or was it an overreaction?
Because those situations call for very different responses. And your nervous system, as sophisticated as it is, doesn't often tell you which one you're dealing with until you learn what the alarm means.
Pain Is an Alarm System. Not a Damage Report.
This is one of the most important things I try to help people understand — and it makes all the difference when it lands.
Pain is not a direct measurement of tissue damage. It's a signal. Your nervous system doesn’t speak in languages, it speaks with symptoms. Pain is a message from your nervous system that says: something got my attention, and I think you should know about it.
That signal is real. It's worth taking seriously. But the alarm going off doesn't tell you how serious the situation actually is. It doesn't tell you which apartment has the problem. And it doesn't mean the whole building is at risk.
Sometimes the alarm goes off because there’s a five-alarm fire. And sometimes it goes off because somebody burned toast.
The nervous system, in ALL situations, is what produces pain. It produces pain when you touch a hot stove. It produces pain when you sprain an ankle. And it produces pain in situations where there is no damage (do you know the tale of two nails?).
Pain is produced when a signal is received by the nervous system (from anywhere - including your body, the environment, your emotions, your thoughts, and your experiences) and it perceives that that signal means there’s some danger or threat. We see this all the time in situations that don’t relate to an injury - stomach ache when you’re anxious, headache when you’re tired, tight shoulders when you’re stressed. These examples are well known situations. Considering this, is it that hard to believe that chronic pain of any sort can be created in the same way? Again, this doesn’t mean it’s imaginary or that it’s something you thought your way into or can think your way out of - it’s very real pain.
As well, under certain conditions, the nervous system can become sensitized — meaning it sounds the alarm more easily, and more loudly, than the situation might call for. That's not a flaw in the system. It's the system being cautious. But if you treat every alarm like a five-alarm fire, you'll spend a lot of energy bracing for an emergency that may not be as serious as it feels.
And Then There's the Smudging
There's another layer to this that doesn't get talked about enough.
When pain is present over time, the brain's ability to clearly map where signals are coming from can decrease. In the somatosensory cortex — the part of the brain responsible for processing body sensations — prolonged pain causes a kind of blurring. Researchers sometimes call this smudging.
Think of it like a photo slowly going out of focus. The signals are still coming in. The brain is still working. It just can't quite tell exactly where things are coming from, or what they mean. The picture loses resolution.
This is why pain can sometimes feel so hard to describe or locate. Why it sometimes seems to spread. Why you might notice it in one spot one day and somewhere slightly different the next. That's not imaginary — that's the map working with less clarity than it normally would.
The good news is that the map can sharpen again. It takes time, and it takes the right kind of attention. But it's not permanent.
So What Do You Do When the Alarm Goes Off?
You check the building.
Rather than bracing, avoiding, or catastrophizing — you get curious. You try to figure out what actually triggered the alarm, where it might actually be coming from, and what the signal is genuinely trying to say.
This is essentially what somatic tracking is about. It's a practice of turning toward the signal with curiosity rather than fear — going door to door through the building, so to speak, to get a clearer picture of what's actually happening. It very literally rewires your brain to correctly interpret signals from your body.
It's not about dismissing pain. It's not about pushing through or ignoring the alarm. It's about learning to read it more accurately — because a more accurate read usually leads to a better response.
Pain is information. Real, meaningful, worth paying attention to.
But an alarm going off doesn't tell you the whole story. And before you react, it's worth taking a breath and asking — is this actually a fire? Or did somebody burn toast?
Because that question can be the difference between living in pain and learning to heal.
