Pain thresholds vary, and yours may change as you age and along with fluctuations in your hormones. You have some control over your pain threshold, but much of it is a function of your biology, sex, age and environment. Consult a health care provider if you plan therapy to address pain.
Measuring Pain
Your pain threshold can be measured in three different ways. One is the point at which your brain perceives a stimulus as causing pain, such as the difference between the sensations of warmth and burning. Your pain tolerance measures your pain sensitivity, or the point at which pain becomes intolerable for you. The circumstances of your pain and your temperament play a role in your pain tolerance. For example, you would likely tolerate more pain from heat if rescuing someone from a fire than when participating in a laboratory study. On a cellular level, your nociceptive threshold is the point at which a stimulus is enough to trigger your nerves designed to sense cell damage. This pain threshold can only be altered by a medical condition such as diabetes that damages peripheral nerves.
Pain Factors
Age and sex have an influence on pain thresholds. Older men have a lower pain threshold than younger men. This difference among older and younger women also exists but is less pronounced, according to "The Pain Chronicles," by Melanie Thernstrom. Men have a higher pain tolerance than women, and older men who are able to tolerate less pain than younger men still have a higher threshold than younger women.
Pain Perception
Raising your serotonin levels can also raise your pain threshold, say Dharma Singh Khalsa and Cameron Stauth, authors of "The Pain Cure." That's because it can decrease the amount of one of the main chemical carriers of pain in your body that gets released. Serotonin also blocks the perception of pain in your brain, even if pain signals have reached it.
Women's Pain
The theory that women have a higher pain threshold than men so they can cope with childbirth used to be popular, according to an August 25, 2008 Daily Mail newspaper article, "Women Don't Have a Higher Pain Threshold than Men," by Julie Moult. Even though the opposite is now known to be true, women often don't get the care they need for pain, Moult reports. Widely used, over-the-counter drugs for pain often are less effective for women, and prescription medicines such as morphine also work differently in women's bodies than in men's. In addition, women are more susceptible to many painful conditions due to different body compositions, hormones and central nervous systems than men. For example, if you're a woman, you are likely to have lower pain thresholds during certain phases of your menstrual cycle. Until recently, however, most studies on pain were done using male rodents with the incorrect assumption that the genders suffer pain similarly, the Daily Mail reported.
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