As I sat in the doctor's office this morning waiting to get some routine blood work done, I got to thinking... why is pain good? For me personally, I absolutely hate getting blood drawn. I am not sure if I have small veins, or veins that just don't want to come out, but getting stuck 2-3 times every time I go to get blood drawn has become somewhat of a normal occurrence. So, as you can imagine, I dread it...

Back to my original thought: Why is pain good?

What is pain?

Pain is defined by dictionary.com as:

physical suffering or distress, as due to injury, illness, etc.

or

a distressing sensation in a particular part of the body: a back pain.

or

mental or emotional suffering or torment.

As you can see by the definition above, pain comes mainly in 2 forms: 

1. Physical Pain: which affects mainly the physical body.
2. Emotional Pain: which affects mainly our emotional well being.

Why is physical pain good?

1. Pain alerts us that something is wrong:

This keeps us alive. If we never felt pain when something was wrong we wouldn't know to take care of it. For example, a wound that keeps bleeding needs to be sewn shut otherwise we would bleed to death. Without feeling pain we would probably just bleed out from that wound without knowing that something needs to be done. 

2. Pain alerts us that something is starting to go wrong:

The first example had to do with something we could physically see and touch, but what about when something goes wrong inside our bodies that we cannot see? If we do not feel any pain we do not know that we need to do something about it. For example when we get a sharp pain in our lower right abdomen it tells us that perhaps something is wrong with our appendix and we possibly need to take immediate action otherwise it could rupture releasing many harmful bacteria into our bodies and potentially kill us. 

3. Pain teaches us to avoid certain things:

We learn very early on that touching a hot stove burns our hand. That teaches us to avoid touching hot things. The same can be said of cutting our finger with a sharp knife on accident. The pain we experience teaches us to be very careful around things that can potentially hurt us. This works great at keep us injury free and our bodies operating at their optimal level. 

4. Pain is a socializing mechanism:

Humans are meant to be social creatures. We can see it in many aspects of life. Being hurt/injured and feeling pain often requires us to depend on the help of others. This often encourages people to treat others how they would want to be treated if they were in a similar situation. Society as a whole is much better off because of this. Can you imagine what the world would be like if no one ever really needed help from anyone else? It likely wouldn't be a very pretty place...

Why is emotional pain good?

1. Emotional pain often makes us stronger:

If you have every faced a tragedy of some kind, you can relate to this. Often times when we think about a terrible event that could occur we may think that there is no way we could ever handle that, there is no way we could ever recover from such an event. Well, when one of those events happens we often do come out OK on the other side. We might not be happy about what has happened, but we eventually emerge, and in doing so we learn that we are much stronger than we every realized and better equipped to handle hardships in the future. 

2. Emotional pain teaches us life lessons:

Throughout our life we are constantly learning. We are learning about the world and we are learning about ourselves. Through experiencing emotional pain we often learn what our preferences are. Preferences in relationships, preferences in our work environment, and even preferences in the kind of people we associate with. By experiencing emotional pain we are better able to chose paths that will make us happier in the long run and better identify which preferences we truly prefer. 

3. Emotional pain helps create success:

This may sound counter intuitive at first, but think about that for one second. If we were carried everywhere in life, our leg muscles would eventually deteriorate and become useless. The same is true of our emotional health. If we are never tested and tried, we never grow, become stronger, and develop the coping/life skills we need in order to handle whatever comes our way. Going through struggles gives us the confidence to handle the next ones that come up, and there will always be next ones. 

4. Emotional pain helps us appreciate the good times:

If everything was great all the time, would we know it was great? If everything always worked perfectly, would we appreciate it? The answer to both of those questions is a resounding; "no way!". 

Often times we must spend some time in the muck emotionally to appreciate the times when everything is "rainbows and puppy dogs". You must experience some bad things in life to truly appreciate the good things. 

All of those things are true and important, but the number one reason that pain is good is that it makes us human. It makes us feel alive. 

We all long to live forever, but as we have seen on many vampire films and other films alike, the person who lives forever longs to be able to die. The person who can't feel anything, longs to feel something, even if it is excruciating pain. They just want to feel.  

It is often said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well that may be true of love and pain as well. In life, the amount you are hurt emotionally provides you the ability to feel an equal amount of love and also an equal amount that you are able to give to others that you would never have been able to if there was never any pain experienced in the first place. 

So in conclusion, why is pain good?

Because it makes us human! 

Live well my friends :)

Sources:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pain

http://becrobbins.com/blog/top-10-reasons-emotional-pain-is-good/

Image Sources:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/60657926205216862/

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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/450922981417347921/

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