I Reviewed My Will. Then I Went Hiking.

When you’ve been hurting long enough, a unique kind of exhaustion can set in. Not just physical exhaustion, though that’s almost guaranteed. What I’m talking about is the exhaustion of possibility.

It comes from trying something new. Hoping. Adjusting. Hoping again. Going through the cycle enough times that hope itself starts to feel like a liability.

That's where I was when I found myself reading through my life insurance policy. Not dramatically in crisis. Just quietly and methodically, making sure everything was in order, because some part of me had stopped expecting to get better.

I want to tell you what happened after that. Not because my story is yours, or because I think a personal account substitutes for the right kind of help. But because the thing that changed everything for me started with a conversation I almost didn't have, and it introduced me to a way of understanding chronic pain that was never presented in any doctor's office.

What follows is how I got from there to here.

Before I get into the story, let me say something you probably already know, but isn’t acknowledged enough.

Chronic pain isn't just physical. There's a cost to relationships, to your sense of who you are, to the version of yourself you thought you were going to be.

Plans get cancelled. Activities you built your identity around drop off of your calendar. You become the person who has to check in with their body before committing to anything.

Family members learn to read your face before asking if you're up for something.

Somewhere underneath all of that is an emotion most people with chronic pain know well and rarely admit to out loud: shame. Not about the pain itself, but about what it's taken from you, and who you haven't been able to be.

You may recognize that from your own story, and it was definitely part of mine.

My Brief Backstory

My pain started with a torn tendon in my shoulder. Surgery went well, but something shifted during recovery that I didn't fully understand at the time. I became hyperaware of my shoulder in a way that went beyond normal caution. I was monitoring it constantly, anticipating problems before they arrived.

And then something strange (and scary) happened. Pain appeared in my other shoulder. Then my neck. Then down both arms.

Over the following year, I saw numerous specialists, underwent a raft of diagnostic tests, tried more physical therapy, medications, and steroid injections.

Nothing helped for long. The symptoms kept spreading. Eventually, there was no part of my body that wasn't producing some kind of alarming sensation. I fell into what I now call Google spirals: each new symptom sent me back to my phone, and each search led me somewhere worse. I pulled back from family, from friends, from work, from the activities that made life feel full.

I was convinced I was heading toward permanent disability. That's when I reviewed my will.

The Cup of Coffee That Changed My Life

The turning point came from a direction I didn't expect. I met an old friend for coffee. She'd spent years dealing with chronic pain and multiple diagnoses, and I was simply hoping to learn some coping strategies from someone who'd been living with it longer than me.

The person who walked into the coffee shop was not the person I remembered. She was pain-free, off all medications, and visibly more settled and alive than I'd seen her in years.

The transformation didn’t come from a new treatment or a wonder drug. Rather, she had come to understand that her nervous system had gotten stuck in a state of high alert, and that the pain her body was producing was real, but it wasn’t a signal of ongoing physical damage. Her brain had learned to interpret neutral sensations as threatening, doing so automatically, on a loop, for decades.

She described symptoms that moved around her body, appeared inconsistently, had no concrete medical explanation, and didn't respond to physical treatment. She mentioned personality traits that tend to show up in people most susceptible to this pattern: perfectionism, people-pleasing, a tendency toward anxiety and catastrophizing.

She looked at me and asked, “Ring any bells?”

“It rings EVERY bell” was my response.

A quick note: I wrote two other articles that go into the mechanisms of neuroplastic symptoms. If you haven’t read them yet, you may want to check them out to better understand the significance of my coffee meetup. Find them here and here.

I'm not suggesting your situation is identical to mine. Everyone's pain story is different, and nothing here is a substitute for proper medical evaluation.

What I am saying is that if parts of this story “ring bells” for you, it’s important that you pay attention to the music.

Maybe your pain started after what seemed like a minor physical event and never fully resolved. Maybe it's spread or moved around over time. Maybe it reliably gets worse during stressful stretches and eases when you're absorbed in something you love. Maybe you've had the strange experience of being told your tests look fine while feeling anything but.

These aren't signs of weakness or imagination; they're patterns. And patterns that are learned can, with the right understanding and approach, be unlearned.

The reason my doctors couldn't tell me what was wrong is that nothing was physically wrong with me. I had a nervous system stuck in danger mode. The path out wasn't another treatment. It was understanding what was actually happening, and learning to send my nervous system a different message.

Neuroscience tells us that what the brain has learned, it can unlearn. That's great news for those with chronic pain and symptoms.

My most profound understanding once I learned and embraced what was actually going on: I wasn't broken.

My nervous system had learned to generate pain, and it was doing exactly what nervous systems do after prolonged exposure to fear and perceived threat. Efficiently and reliably, but incorrectly.

That shift in understanding is not a small thing. When you believe your body is damaged, every new sensation is taken as evidence of that damage. When you understand that your nervous system is stuck in a learned pattern, those same sensations become signals that can be responded to differently. And your responses form the foundation of recovery.

Recovery Doesn't Move in a Straight Line

I think it’s important to add a few details to my story so I don’t give the impression that my recovery was somehow magical, or even easy.

Not long into the process, I decided to test myself on a short trail near home. Nothing ambitious. A route I'd walked dozens of times before. After just a few steps, my hips and legs felt like they were locking up, as if my body couldn’t believe what I was trying to do.

I tried talking myself through it, repeating things I'd been learning about safety and nervous system retraining. The fear won anyway. I turned around, walked home, and lay down on the floor thinking I was right back where I started.

That moment taught me something that took a little while to fully absorb: setbacks aren't evidence that recovery isn't happening. They're part of what unlearning actually looks like.

The nervous system can be extremely stubborn when it comes to relinquishing its habits. It tests them, retreats, and tests again. Progress tends to happen underneath the surface, quietly, before it shows up anywhere you can measure.

Over time, small “victories” accumulated. My fear around movement eased, and the pain gradually dissipated. It wasn’t linear, and there were some frustrating detours. But overall, things shifted in an unmistakably positive direction. I got back to hiking, to running, and to an active life I'd started to believe was permanently behind me.

What I Understood Differently Looking Back

Another thing this experience gave me was something I didn’t expect: It offered clarity to other experiences from my past.

For roughly 10 years, starting soon after I changed jobs, bought a house, and became a father within the span of a few months, I had chronic migraines. Consistent, debilitating, and unresponsive to most of the treatments I tried.

At the time, I thought of them as a medical problem to manage. Now I understand them differently. They were the product of a nervous system under enormous pressure, communicating in the only language available to it.

Even more remarkable is that the underlying stress came from very positive life events.

The migraines didn't resolve because of any particular treatment. They resolved, gradually, as I adapted to the demands of that new life. The pressure eased and the symptoms followed. Had I known then what I know now, I estimate I could have spared myself nearly 1,000 headaches.

I’m not being glib when I say that. I say it because the same brain that learned to produce ten years of migraines also learned to produce the cascade of symptoms that followed my surgery, and the same brain learned to stop. Not a small thing to know about yourself, right?

Chronic pain isn't a life sentence. That’s a fact that I, along with many thousands of others, have directly experienced.

A Small Reflection for the Coming Week

Give this a shot, and try not to overthink it or treat it as something that has any particular “right" answer.

Think back to when your pain first appeared, or when it significantly worsened. What was happening in your life at that time?

You’re not assigning blame or concluding that stress and emotions caused your pain in some simple, direct way. That framing misses the point, and it tends to add shame to an already heavy experience.

You’re simply noticing: was there a period of sustained pressure you were pushing through? A major life transition, welcome or unwelcome? A loss? A stretch where you were running on empty and not saying so out loud?

These experiences aren’t a direct cause for your pain, like touching a hot stove leading to a burn. Think of them more as conditions that can put a nervous system on high alert and keep it there long after the external circumstances have changed.

If you notice something, write it down. One sentence is enough. Don't analyze it or try to do anything with it yet.

This is a starting point for you to look in a direction that most chronic pain treatment never does. It might not seem that consequential right now, but as you continue on this trajectory it will make more and more sense (like my migraines).

If you've read this far, trust that something in here has landed with you.

When I finally understood what was happening in my nervous system, I couldn't un-know it. And that knowledge, uncomfortable and strange as it was at first, became the foundation of everything that came next.

There's more to explore in this series. If this post raised questions you'd like to sit with or talk through, please reach out. My contact information is on this website, and I read everything that comes in.

Wishing you quick healing and good health.