Let me make something clear right off the bat. I am not a physical therapist or a medical professional. Do with that what you will. However, I have helped people through countless nagging injuries over the years, and the most common ones are a slight muscle pull or the classic “I woke up and this hurts, and I have no idea what happened” phenomenon.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that movement is almost always the answer to these things.

It’s not medieval times. We aren’t supposed to strap ourselves to a board and lie on it for months when our back hurts.

I can already feel this heading toward a discussion of my most hated phrase, possibly ever: “I threw my back out.”

What in the hell does that mean? You threw it out? Where did it go? What part of it did you throw out?

It’s another catch-all phrase we’ve integrated into our vocabulary. It’s widely known and accepted, yet almost nobody has any idea what it actually means. As far as I can tell, it often just communicates, “My back hurts, and this phrase gets me sympathy when I say it.”

Okay, where am I going with all of this?

Throwing your back out is a great way to introduce the defense system.

Sometimes, you make a movement your body doesn’t feel confident handling. Maybe it questions whether the muscles in that area are strong enough, mobile enough, flexible enough, or simply prepared enough to accomplish the task you’ve asked of them.

Whatever the reason, your body’s defense system can crank the dial way up.

What does that mean? You get a pain signal, and sometimes that signal is extremely intense. It can feel as though your body is trying to stop you from making any movement that might put that area at risk because it doesn’t trust your ability to handle it right now.

And just so I’m clear, this doesn’t mean there isn’t an actual injury. There absolutely can be one. I’m talking about the way your body’s defense system can respond to a situation.

The frustrating part is that your body sends the same basic signal for so many different things: pain.

Something is tight, inflamed, torn, strained, bruised, cut—you name it—and the answer can be pain. It’s up to us to decipher what that pain means, and that can be incredibly challenging.

Some people have a low pain tolerance, so they treat almost any pain as a signal to stop doing everything and wait for it to go away. Other people can handle pain a little too well. They push through everything, ignore the warning signs, and keep going to their own detriment.

Neither extreme is particularly helpful.

The key is learning to recognize what falls higher on the scale and what falls lower, then responding accordingly. What needs attention? What needs to be modified? What can you work through with an appropriate amount of movement?

This is where those little reminders come into play. We want to find the appropriate way to move forward, give the body an opportunity to heal and rebuild strength, and gradually turn down that defense dial.

The goal isn’t to ignore pain or push through everything. It’s to become better at understanding what your body is telling you and figuring out what to do about it.

Here’s the pattern we get stuck accepting.

Maybe you bend down and twist awkwardly to pick something up. You feel a little twinge. The next morning, you wake up and can barely bend over without experiencing a spasm-like pain. Maybe you can’t twist in one direction without your back locking up and hurting like you’re getting stabbed.

Immediately, here comes that bullshit line: “Uh-oh. I threw my back out.”

So what do people do? Besides telling anyone and everyone they know, they often stop doing just about everything and wait, hoping it fixes itself.

But there’s another approach.

Turning Down the Defense Dial

Here’s what I’ve seen work hundreds of times with clients in person.

You need to find ways to slowly turn down that defense dial and give your body lots and lots of little reminders that things might not be as bad as they seem.

Every situation is different, but I often start by looking at which movements cause pain. Is it flexion? Extension? Rotation? Lateral bending? Something else?

Once we have a better idea of which movements are causing problems, we look for an exercise variation that’s regressed enough to be manageable, often with minimal pain.

These are the little reminders.

Every repetition becomes an opportunity to tell your body, “Hey, this is okay. I promise. Give me a little more movement, please.”

We start moving, getting the blood flowing, and gradually exploring what the body will tolerate. Sometimes things begin to feel a little better.

Is this an instant fix?

No.

That bullshit on Instagram about one simple exercise fixing your pain in minutes is almost always clickbait.

I’ll play devil’s advocate a little bit. Sometimes, minor aches and pains really can improve with a little movement. You might loosen up, warm up, and feel much better than you did when you first started moving.

But that doesn’t mean every problem is that simple. Most of the time, making meaningful progress takes work.

Think about what happens after surgery. Physical therapy often begins with basic isometric exercises or passive range-of-motion movements. Little by little, as you regain mobility and strength and your body adapts, you work toward doing a little more, then a little more, until you’re eventually back to doing your regular exercises.

The process is gradual.

Sometimes, the solution involves one simple exercise performed multiple times throughout the day. Each repetition adds up. Other situations require a more involved approach.

Either way, the goal is to build confidence and capacity rather than remain stuck avoiding movement altogether.

This is also how you learn more about your own pain tolerance.

As you practice turning down the defense dial, you start to understand what different levels of pain feel like for you. You become better at recognizing the difference between something that needs attention, something that needs modification, and something that may simply require patience and gradual exposure.

You learn where new pains fall on your personal scale.

That doesn’t mean you ignore them. It means you become more capable of deciding what you need to do next.

Do you need to back off? Change the movement? Get help? Keep going carefully? Give it time? The more experience you gain, the better you become at answering those questions.

As the defense dial starts to turn down, we can work on building strength in the muscles and movement patterns that need it. Ideally, we build enough capacity to handle those demands more confidently in the future.

And that brings us to the real reason I’m writing about any of this.

Because the same concept shows up somewhere else.

You guessed it: your mind.

Your Emotional Defense System

The same thing happens with emotional pain.

It all hurts, and it’s up to us to decipher what that pain means.

Rejection, embarrassment, disappointment, fear, frustration, grief, loneliness, shame—they can all hurt, but the feeling itself doesn’t automatically tell you what you need to do about it.

Just like with physical pain, the signal is real, but understanding what it means can be the difficult part.

Sometimes, something relatively small happens in your day and triggers a huge emotional reaction.

You read a text and assign a tone to it that might not even be there. Someone says something to you or gives you a certain look, and you interpret it negatively. You glance at yourself in the mirror, don’t like what you see, and suddenly you’re in a horrible mood.

The event itself might be relatively minor, but your reaction can feel enormous.

And if you let that reaction take over, it can affect the rest of your day.

It changes how you interact with your loved ones, how you perform at work, how you treat random people you encounter, how you respond to the cashier or server who has absolutely nothing to do with your problem, and even how you behave in traffic.

One little thing can set off a chain reaction that follows you around for hours.

It’s the same concept.

Your emotional defense dial is cranked all the way up, and you need to figure out what YOU can do to slowly turn it back down.

Some people have a very low tolerance for emotional discomfort. The smallest criticism, inconvenience, or uncomfortable conversation can cause them to shut down. They avoid the situation entirely because the feeling is too intense.

Other people have a tolerance that’s too high. They ignore their emotions, work through everything, and convince themselves they’re fine until the unresolved issue eventually creates a much bigger problem.

Again, neither extreme is particularly helpful.

The goal isn’t to avoid every uncomfortable emotion, and it isn’t to force yourself through everything without acknowledging how you feel.

The goal is to learn how to understand where the feeling falls on your personal scale and what kind of response it requires.

Sometimes, you need to turn the dial down before you can deal with the actual problem.

Just as your physical body responds to certain movements, your mind responds to different experiences and strategies. The trick is figuring out which ones work for you.

Some people need a walk in nature. Some need an intense workout to burn off some energy. Some people get enough joy from seeing their dog excitedly greet them at the door to change their entire mood.

There isn’t one universal answer.

But there’s a flip side to all of this.

You also have the opportunity to fall back into your bad habits.

Maybe you start picking fights with people. Maybe you binge on junk food. Maybe you have a drink or smoke a cigarette. Or a vape pen, if you’re one of the kids.

You know what I’m talking about.

Something happens, you feel a certain way, and before you know it, you’re doing the same thing you’ve done a hundred times before.

You don’t stop to think about whether it will actually help. You just run the program.

That’s why you need to start building your toolbox.

You need to become aware of what you’re doing when your defense system kicks in. Otherwise, your autopilot programs are going to take over, and you’ll keep relying on the same coping habits whether they serve you or not.

This is another huge opportunity to edit your programs in real time.

Instead of automatically reacting to how you feel, you can learn to recognize what’s happening and deliberately choose a response that helps you turn that dial down.

Sometimes, that dial turns quickly. Other times, you might only manage a tiny adjustment over a longer period.

That’s okay.

Like anything else, the better you get at this, the better you become at recognizing what you need and understanding how much work it takes to get yourself back to baseline.

You learn what works for you.

You also learn more about your own emotional pain tolerance.

You start to recognize which feelings you can work through, which ones require support, and which ones are warning signs that you need to stop and address something more seriously.

You learn where new emotional pain falls on your personal scale.

That awareness gives you more options. You can decide whether you need to sit with the feeling, move through it gradually, talk it out, change your environment, or take a step back before responding.

And the next time it happens, you have a little more experience to draw from.

What Are You Practicing?

As a trainer, I notice this all the time in the way people talk when they first walk into the gym.

Almost every session begins with me asking people how they’re doing and how their bodies are feeling.

A lot of times, I get the quick “Pretty good” response, and we move on to the workout. From there, I watch how they move and use that feedback to get a better picture of what’s going on.

That’s fine.

But I’d say about half the time, people immediately start listing everything that’s wrong.

They didn’t sleep well last night. They feel like shit today. They’re exhausted. Their body hurts. Work is stressing them out. Something else happened that morning.

Now, I realize I’m asking the question, so I’m opening the door for these responses. That’s part of the conversation.

What gets interesting is when I notice it becoming a pattern that happens nearly every single session.

That’s when I start connecting the dots.

You can have your own defense system elevated without even realizing it. And if you develop a habit of focusing on everything that’s wrong in your life, you might start reinforcing that state of mind before you’ve even given yourself a chance to do anything else.

It’s almost as though some people expect a hero’s welcome just for walking through the door while carrying the weight of all the horrible things happening in their lives.

And you know what? Sometimes they do need that acknowledgment. Sometimes people need to vent. Sometimes life really is kicking their ass, and talking about it is helpful.

I’m not saying you should pretend everything is great when it isn’t.

I’m talking about what happens when the negative rundown becomes your automatic starting point. When you repeatedly tell yourself and everyone around you how terrible you feel, how tired you are, how much you hurt, and how difficult everything is, you can start setting expectations for what comes next.

You might even be giving yourself permission not to perform your best before you’ve started.

And the more you focus on those things, the more opportunities you give yourself to find evidence that confirms them.

You feel tired, so you look for more evidence that you’re tired. You expect the workout to be terrible, so every little inconvenience reinforces that expectation. You decide you’re having a bad day, and everything that happens afterward becomes another reason you’re right.

This doesn’t mean those feelings are imaginary. It means the things you focus on can influence how you interpret what happens next.

Henry Ford is often credited with saying, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

There’s a reason that idea has stuck around.

Your expectations matter.

And this doesn’t stop when you leave the gym. The same patterns can follow you into your relationships, your work, and the rest of your day.

So, once again, you have an opportunity.

You can recognize the pattern and ask yourself whether it’s actually helping you.

You can acknowledge that you’re tired without deciding the entire day is going to be a disaster. You can admit that your back is bothering you without assuming you’re incapable of doing anything. You can recognize that you’re in a bad mood without handing that mood control over every interaction you have.

You don’t have to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

You just don’t have to let it dictate everything that happens next.

Edit Your Programs

Think about the programs you’ve installed on the hard drive of your brain and body.

Every time you respond to a situation in the same way, you’re practicing that response. The more automatic it becomes, the less likely you are to stop and question it.

That’s true of physical habits, emotional reactions, and the stories you tell yourself about your life.

If you never take the time to examine those patterns, they’re going to keep running on autopilot whenever the right circumstances trigger them.

And every time they run, you get another opportunity to reinforce them.

Until you decide to do something different.

You don’t need to change everything overnight. You don’t need to have the perfect response to every situation. You don’t even need to get it right every time.

You need to start noticing what’s happening.

Notice when your defense system kicks in. Notice the thoughts you’re having, the emotions that follow, and the actions you’re tempted to take.

Then ask yourself a question:

Is this reaction actually helping me, or am I just running a program I’ve practiced a thousand times?

That question alone can create a little space between what you feel and what you do next.

And in that space, you have a choice.

You can keep running the same program, or you can start practicing something different. You can experiment with a new response, see what happens, and use that experience to figure out what works better for you.

That’s how you begin installing something new.

Turn the Dial

The moral of the story is that sometimes your defense system overreacts, and that reaction can affect your entire day or even your entire week without you realizing it.

There are times when your system is doing its job, and you should listen to it. Pain can signal a problem that needs attention. Emotions can tell you something important about your circumstances.

But the signal is not always a complete explanation.

Physical pain can mean something is tight, weak, cut, bruised, inflamed, torn, sprained, strained, burned, or something else entirely. Emotional pain can come from fear, grief, rejection, shame, anger, loneliness, or disappointment.

It all hurts, but the meaning requires interpretation.

And that interpretation is personal.

Some people shut down at the first sign of discomfort. Others ignore pain until it becomes impossible to overlook. The same thing happens emotionally. Some people avoid every difficult feeling, while others bury everything until it eventually comes out in a much more destructive way.

In my 17 years of experience, I’ve seen plenty of situations where the reaction seems bigger than the problem warrants, and we get stuck accepting that reaction as the only way to respond.

We stop moving because we’re afraid of what might happen. We let a bad mood dictate our behavior. We repeat the same habits because they’re familiar, even when they’re not helping us.

The answer isn’t to ignore every warning sign or force yourself through everything.

It’s to learn how to recognize what’s happening, figure out what you need, and respond accordingly.

Sometimes that means backing off. Sometimes it means taking action. Sometimes it means doing something small that feels almost insignificant in the moment.

Those little reminders matter.

A little movement. A different thought. A walk instead of an argument. A moment to question the story you’re telling yourself. One small decision that interrupts a pattern you’ve been repeating for years.

Over time, those experiences teach you more about your own tolerance. You learn what you can work through, what needs to be modified, what requires support, and what should not be ignored.

You don’t have to fix everything at once.

You just have to start learning how to turn the dial.

Pay attention to your patterns. Build your toolbox. And start giving yourself new experiences that teach you a different way to respond.

The more you practice, the better you get at figuring out what you need.

And the better you get at figuring out what you need, the more capable you become of handling whatever comes next.