Welcome to Tell Me About Your Pain. I'm Alan Gordon.

And I'm Alon Ziv.

Today we're going to be talking about the key to breaking the pain cycle.

We're excited to be doing this podcast in partnership with Curable.

We're so grateful that with their help, thousands of you have already listened to our first episode.

They've got a lot of great tools and information, and you can check them out

at curablehealth.com. Before we dive in, I wanted to talk about my own experiences with pain.

Back when I was in my mid-20s, I developed chronic back pain, and I saw a lot of doctors.

I got a lot of diagnoses, herniated discs, dysdegeneration, chyphosis of the spine.

And I remember thinking, I'm only 25 years old. How can my spine be this damaged?

Anyway, I did all the treatments. I bought all the gadgets. I had a million back pillows.

You remember how many back pillows I had? So many back

pillows. And none of it helped. And eventually, using a mind-body approach, I overcame all my pain,

even though I had all these structural issues going on with my back. And I didn't know this at the time,

I wish I would have, but the majority of people with no back pain have disc bulges and

dys degeneration, that we all have these things.

That stuff is super common.

Our friend Dr. Schubiner, who specializes in chronic pain, calls them normal abnormalities.

Everybody's got them.

Right.

So if the structural issues weren't causing my pain, what was? And to answer that, we need to talk a little bit about how pain works. Right. So if the structural issues weren't causing my pain, what was? And to answer that, we need to talk a little bit about how pain works. So let's do a little thought experiment. Okay. Imagine you get a fresh steaming cup of coffee. Okay. I don't really drink coffee, but... Well, it's a hypothetical cup of coffee. But, you know, just for the sake of argument,

it's tea now. Okay. Thank you for working with me. Actually, I don't really drink caffeine.

...