Anna spends most of her workday typing on her laptop. After a few hours, she starts rubbing her wrists as her pain sets in. A glance at her desk reveals the painkillers that she uses to ease her discomfort. And for John, his neck pain sets in every time he listens to the news about a potential economic crisis and his stress levels start to rise.
These experiences of pain are not unique. Nearly 35% of people worldwide experience pain every day, and in the UK alone, almost 20 million people live with it.
Pain used to be thought of purely as a symptom of a physical problem: you break a leg, experience pain, see a doctor and the injury is treated. However, research has shown that pain can arise not only from physical injuries but also from emotional or psychological circumstances. This suggests that people can experience pain even in the absence of a physical injury.
In light of this understanding, other research conceptualised pain as something that can be related to a person’s socioeconomic situation, their thoughts and their behaviour. This perspective suggests that pain does not simply originate and stay in the body but influences and is influenced by other aspects of people’s lives.
For example, one study I was involved in found that people living in countries with higher unemployment rates reported greater levels of pain than those in countries where there was less joblessness. This was true regardless of an individual’s own employment status. It indicates that pain can be shaped not only by someone’s circumstances but also by broader social and economic environments.
One possible explanation is that being surrounded by higher levels of unemployment triggers feelings of financial and job insecurity, which in turn can exacerbate pain. This is consistent with evidence suggesting that stress can contribute to inflammation, and increase physical pain.
FOTO Eak/Shutterstock
And of course, pain has significant consequences in the workplace. For instance, in the UK, musculoskeletal conditions such as arthritis and back pain account for around 30 million lost working days each year.
This not only undermines the productivity of organisations, but it also affects key aspects of workers’ wellbeing. On the one hand, time lost from work can erode the sense of dignity and purpose that having a job provides, for example by limiting time spent on meaningful activities or building social relationships.
On the other, people’s capacity to earn a living may be reduced, especially in jobs where income is directly tied to the time they spend working – freelance workers, for example.
A different way of thinking about pain
More broadly, this all contributes to research into the measures used to assess how citizens in a country are feeling.
For a long time, governments have been using pure economic indicators, such as national income represented by GDP per capita to assess how well their citizens were doing. But these indicators fail to capture aspects that are key for wellbeing, including things like income inequality or air pollution.
As a result, researchers have suggested alternative metrics that can provide a more accurate picture of wellbeing. These include happiness and life satisfaction, which are typically assessed by asking people to report on these aspects of their experience.
But another strong metric that could be used to enhance this picture is pain. After all, pain can capture dimensions of the human experience that are not fully addressed by traditional economic indicators or by proposed wellbeing measures.
For instance, although measuring life satisfaction or emotions like sadness and anger can provide insights into how citizens are feeling, assessing them often requires complex evaluation and reflection.
In contrast, pain can be seen as a more direct and reliable indicator, as it is experienced in the body and does not require the same level of cognitive processing. One way to measure pain is to ask people to rate their pain from zero (meaning no pain) to ten (meaning the worst pain they can imagine).
Since everyone has felt pain at some point in their lives, this technique makes measuring it straightforward and the results relatively trustworthy.
What’s more, pain may be less susceptible to the stigma that can make people reluctant to report supposedly negative emotions like sadness or anger in certain settings or cultures.
This shows that pain may be much more than just a personal problem; it affects several domains including work and relationships. Unlike abstract numbers such as GDP or survey data, pain is something felt in the body. This can make it a powerful signal of wellbeing.
Paying attention to pain can help governments and workplaces understand what really matters for people’s quality of life – and why supporting those in pain isn’t just a health issue, but a matter of social and economic importance.
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