Is Your Nervous System Involved in Your Back Pain?

The answer is yes.

The nervous system is how your body feels all sensations. Everything from pleasure to pain.

So whether it's a broken bone or chronic back pain, the nervous system is a huge factor.

So, what exactly does that mean and what can you do about it?

If you've had back pain for months or years, you've probably tried a lot.

Stretches. Core work. Chiropractors. Massage. Maybe even surgery…

And somehow pain is still controlling your life.

I know that loop because I lived it.

My name is Trey. I injured my L5-S1 disc at the gym when I was 23. I lived with daily back pain for the next four years.

I tried everything:

Physical therapy 💪
Chiropractors 🦴
Medications 💊
Spinal injections 💉
Dry needling 🪡

I got some relief but was never back to pain-free life.

What finally worked was something I had completely ignored for years: my nervous system.

I had spent four years working on my back, and almost no time working on the system that actually controls pain.

How Your Nervous System Works

Every feeling that you experience is controlled by your brain.

I'm not saying your pain is in your head. Your pain is 100% real.

What I'm saying is that pain isn't a direct sign of how damaged your tissue is. Pain is an output.

Your brain and nervous system create it after weighing a ton of information, including:

What's happening in your body
What you've been through in the past
How dangerous a movement feels
Stress 😤
Sleep 😴
Diet 🍔
What you expect is about to happen

This is true for all pain, not just chronic pain.

Think about it like this:

If you stand on something hot. Your nervous system decides this is dangerous and needs your attention.

It sends a message to your brain and creates the burning pain feeling so you will move your foot.

This is one of the ways your body protects itself.

Your Pain Threshold

Think of your nervous system as a fire alarm 🚨

After an injury, it makes sense to sound the pain alarm. This protects you from doing something to make it worse.

The problem is.. sometimes the alarm breaks.

When you're in pain for a long time, your body can become hypersensitive, triggering pain over the simplest things.

The tissue heals, but the alarm has been trained to fire too easily.

Your nervous system is now like a broken fire alarm going off every time you use your kitchen stove.

That's often what chronic pain is. Not a back that's still broken, a hypersensitive alarm system.

3 Signs Your Nervous System Is Playing a Big Role in Your Back Pain

1. Your pain has outlasted the normal healing timeline

Most tissue heals in a matter of days or weeks. If your pain has stuck around way past that, your nervous system is likely keeping the pain going.

2. Your pain is inconsistent

Some days you feel fine. Other days the same movement wrecks you. Your pain changes with stress, bad sleep, your mood, or even what's going on in your life, and you can't figure out why. 🤔

Physical issues don't usually behave that way. A sensitized nervous system does.

3. You're constantly on guard

You tense up before you bend over. You check in with your back all day. You avoid certain movements because they feel dangerous. A flare-up makes you panic that you've hurt yourself again.

That bracing and fear tells your nervous system this isn't safe, which keeps the volume turned up.🚨

The Important Catch

Your nervous system is only one side of the equation.

Your body has been trained to avoid certain movements and it's been under a ton of pressure.

This means that you likely have strength or mobility issues too.

Your back still needs to rebuild strength and confidence through real movement.

Recovery happens on both sides.

That's why you might have gotten some relief from things like physical therapy but not a full recovery.

You were only addressing one side of the problem.

For years I only worked on the physical side, and I plateaued. Once I addressed both, I got my life back.

What To Do About It

For me, it wasn't enough to just understand that my nervous system was playing a role.

I needed a real process for putting that into practice and actually fixing my back.

That's where BackUnbroken came in.

When I was in your shoes, I found a program online called BackUnbroken.

I was skeptical but I tried it out of desperation..

It taught me how to work on both sides: calming the nervous system and rebuilding the physical side with a step-by-step plan.

Within 3 months, I was entirely out of pain.

Not just “feeling better”. 100% back to my old life. Back to playing sports and lifting weights again.

After four years of trying everything else, this was the missing piece that actually got me out of pain.

It changed my life so much that after I recovered, I joined the BackUnbroken team as a coach. Now I work with other people who are going through the same recovery that fixed me.

If you're curious how it all works, I recommend watching the video below. It explains how the program works and how you can try it out for free, so you can see for yourself whether it makes sense for you.

In this video, the founder of BackUnbroken explains how the process works. I worked directly with Nate for my recovery and his method is what got me out of pain when none of the other solutions could. He truly saved my life.

Learn More About BackUnbroken

Back pain is lonely and confusing, and it's different for everyone. But you are not broken, and your back is not beyond repair.

Whether you decide to try the mind-body approach that fixed me, I encourage you to keep looking for solutions. You don't have to accept a fate of lifelong pain.

There is a way out.

- Trey