Pain and injury

Tissues in the body have an amount of load they can take before being injured. Luckily, pain protects you by warning when your body is in danger. For example, if you bend your finger backwards far enough, it will start to hurt. If you let it go at this point, the pain will have saved you from injury. 

After injury, pain becomes very protective. This means you feel pain a long time before injury. This stops further injury, but can also cause you to limit what you do much more than is needed.

 

  

A normal pain buffer gives you maximum function while protecting your tissues from damage. When the system becomes over-preotective the buffer gets bigger, meaning your function is limited much more than needed.