Andrew Huberman· PhD
And believe it or not, your subjective interpretation of what's happening has a profound influence on your experience of pleasure or pain. There are several things that can impact these experiences, but the main categories are expectation. So sort of whether or not you thought or could expect that this thing was going to happen, right? If someone tells you this is going to hurt, I'm going to give you an injection right here, it might hurt for a second. That's very different and your experience of that pain will be very different than if it happened suddenly out of the blue. There's also anxiety, how anxious, or how high or low your level of arousal, autonomic arousal, that's going to impact your experience of pleasure or pain. How well you slept and where you are in the so-called circadian or 24-hour cycle. Our ability to tolerate pain changes dramatically across the 24-hour cycle. And as you can imagine is during the daylight waking hours that we are better able to tolerate, we are more resilient to pain, and we are better able to experience pleasure. At night our threshold for pain is much lower. In other words, the amount of mechanical or chemical or thermal meaning temperature stimulated that can evoke a pain response and how we rate that response is much lower at night. And in particular, in the hours between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM, if you're on a kind of standard circadian schedule. And then the last one is our genes. Pain threshold and how long a pain response lasts is in part dictated by our genes. And later I'm going to discuss this myth or whether or not it's really a myth as to whether or not certain people in particular red heads, people who have reg pigmented hair and fair skin, whether or not their pain thresholds differ. And to just give you a little sneak peek into that, indeed they do and it's because of a genetic difference in a particular gene, in a particular pattern of receptors in the skin that are related to the pigmentation of hair and skin. So we have expectation, anxiety, how well we've slept, where we are in the so-called 24-hour circadian time and our genes.