How to Unlearn Pain: Groundbreaking Research Offers Hope | Yoni K. Ashar
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if chronic pain was caused by faulty wiring in your brain?
And that one shift in understanding can open the door to relief many people never thought was possible.
Chronic pain affects tens of millions, disrupts relationships, limits work, and quietly erodes joy. Yet for many, scans, surgeries, and medications never bring lasting relief. In this conversation, we explore why pain can persist long after the body has healed and what helps the brain finally stand down.
My guest is Yoni K. Ashar, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and director of the Pain and Emotion Research Laboratory. His research uses brain imaging and clinical neuroscience to study chronic pain recovery, with a focus on Pain Reprocessing Therapy.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- A key signal that reveals when pain is driven by the brain, not injury
- A simple shift that helps interrupt the pain–fear cycle
- Why imaging findings can distract from the true source of pain
- How the right kind of gradual exposure retrains the brain to feel safe again
- What decades of pain research reveal about lasting recovery
- Why we’ve gotten pain wrong for so long, and how to get it right
If you’ve tried everything and still hurt, this conversation may offer a new way to understand your pain and a path toward relief. Press play to learn how unlearning pain may be possible.
You can find Yoni at: Website | Episode Transcript
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So chronic pain affects millions of people, and for so many, it just won't go away no matter how many scans or treatments, meds or procedures they try. |
| 0:09.1 | Well, what if the pain is real, but the source wasn't where you've been looking or maybe where a lot of people who are helping you out have been looking? |
| 0:17.0 | Today's guest, Dr. Yoni Ashar, he's a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who studies how the brain learns pain and how it can unlearn it. |
| 0:26.0 | He directs the pain and emotion research lab at the University of Colorado, Anshut, and uses brain imaging to understand why pain can persist long after the body has healed. |
| 0:36.6 | In this conversation, we explore why chronic pain |
| 0:39.1 | often becomes a learned neural pattern, how fear quietly keeps that loop alive, what actually |
| 0:45.0 | helps the brain feel safe again. And we talk about why imaging findings can make pain worse |
| 0:50.0 | or even be totally unrelated to pain, even when they're being pointed to as the source of it, |
| 0:54.7 | how a powerful protocol called pain reprocessing therapy is changing the game. |
| 1:00.4 | And what decades of pain research are revealing about real recovery? |
| 1:04.9 | If you or someone you love lives with ongoing pain, this may change how you see it and what's possible. |
| 1:11.9 | So excited to share this conversation with you. |
| 1:14.1 | I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. |
| 1:21.3 | You know, I'm excited to talk to you. |
| 1:23.0 | I feel like the topic of chronic pain is something that it affects so many people. |
| 1:28.5 | It's so poorly understood. |
| 1:30.8 | And we're in a moment where I feel like there's so much contributing to a mass level of suffering |
| 1:37.7 | that maybe doesn't have to happen at all if or on the same level. |
| 1:42.8 | And you have been studying pain, specifically chronic pain, |
| 1:47.7 | during pain, and it will tease out what that actually means. This isn't just a professional |
| 1:52.9 | pursuit for you, though. This has a very deeply personal origin, too. Take me into that. |
| 1:58.3 | Yeah, that's right. And I don't always talk about the personal side of it |
... |
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