"I want to face my failures on my own. If I have to fail, let me fail by myself — completely alone. I'm an adult, Father. I don't need you barging into my life and protecting me from every setback. Please stop."
That was a line from the 2022 Korean drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo that really got to me. Korean parents tend to be deeply protective of their children — geum-iya, ok-iya ("my gold, my jade"), as the old expression goes. The degree varies, but the impulse is universal: every parent hurts when their child hurts, and sometimes, in trying to spare their child pain, they end up trying to feel it for them.
But pain is necessary for growth. No flower blooms without swaying in the wind, and no young creature matures without growing pains. You grow up through difficulty; you mature in proportion to what you have endured.
Yet a troubling attitude toward pain has been gaining ground. The pursuit of "happiness without suffering" — which is not actually achievable — has become something of a cultural trend, producing a generation that wants pleasure without cost. Parents heap praise for fear of causing any hurt; teachers hold back correction for fear of complaints or reports. When discipline disappears from schools and homes, children may suffer fewer immediate wounds, but they also lose the capacity to handle adversity.
Pleasure and Pain: Two Sides of a Single Coin
Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, argues that by overprotecting children from hardship, we have made them afraid of even ordinary difficulties. By inflating their self-esteem with false praise and hidden sacrifice, we have created a new hedonistic era in which young people demand comfort as a right, have no tolerance for frustration, and remain unaware of their own shortcomings. Unable to sit with discomfort, this generation increasingly reaches for whatever will change their mood fastest — binge-watching, painkillers, or other addictive substances.
The numbers are alarming. In the United States since 2000, more than one million people have died from opioid painkiller misuse — a death toll exceeding that of gun violence. And here is a remarkable fact: the brain regions that process pain and the regions that process pleasure are one and the same. Pleasure and pain are not opposites on different sides of a wall. They share the same neural territory, separated by the thinnest of lines. When we relentlessly chase pleasure to escape suffering, or rely on opioids to make every ache disappear, we end up destroying our capacity for ordinary, everyday happiness too.
People are getting lonelier. The COVID-19 pandemic, which essentially mandated social isolation, only accelerated the trend. Loneliness causes pain. Pain makes people withdraw further. Withdrawal deepens isolation. And the cycle continues. A recent Australian study of 12,517 respondents — 927 of whom had chronic pain — looked at the relationship between social connection, pain, and physical activity. Participants were asked: "When I need help, can I find someone?" and "Do I have many friends?" The results showed that greater social support was associated with greater physical activity — and that pain was the link between them. Put simply: the more friends you have, the less pain you feel, and because you feel less pain, you move more.1
It is already well known that doing things together raises the pain threshold.* Rowing, one of the most physically demanding sports there is, hurts considerably less when done with teammates than alone. People who exercise with friends or colleagues can tolerate twice as much pain afterward. We feel less pain singing in a group than singing solo. We laugh harder and hurt less watching a funny movie with someone next to us than watching it alone. The old saying that a burden shared is a burden halved turns out to be literally true.2
\*Pain threshold: the stimulus level at which pain first registers. A threshold of 5 means an intensity of 4 goes unfelt; a threshold of 3 means that same intensity of 4 is felt constantly — and can become chronic.
Oxytocin Is a Natural Painkiller
Can behaviors that raise oxytocin actually relieve pain? As I described earlier, oxytocin affects mothers during childbirth by acting on the brain and spinal cord to reduce pain perception while also helping them forget the pain afterward. In animal studies, twenty-nine out of thirty-three experiments confirmed that oxytocin raises the pain threshold.3
There is human evidence too. One particularly interesting study was conducted in Germany in 2020. Eighty couples who had been living together for at least a year were divided into four groups. The first group inhaled oxytocin only. The second inhaled a placebo but also learned and practiced a positive communication technique twice a day. The third received real oxytocin and practiced positive communication. The fourth did neither. The researchers then measured wound healing and pain levels across all four groups.
The results were revealing — and gendered. For men, inhaled oxytocin was more effective at reducing pain. For women, positive conversation with their partner worked better.
This is not entirely surprising, given that women already have four to five times more oxytocin than men, so adding more through inhalation has a proportionally smaller effect. But the finding that women felt less pain simply from having warm, positive conversations with their partners is worth noting. In another study, researchers gave participants oxytocin and then deliberately induced pain with needle pricks and laser pulses. The oxytocin significantly reduced what people reported feeling. In the scientific community, oxytocin's pain-relieving properties are now well established; current research is focused on understanding exactly how the molecule dampens pain signals.4
A note for those living with a diagnosis of "chronic pain syndrome" — the label doctors use when every test comes back normal and the cause remains unknown. The name sounds scientific, but it is basically medicine admitting it does not know what is going on. These patients are usually referred to neurology, on the logic that if nothing is wrong with the body, the problem must be in the mind. If someone you care about — a child, a spouse, a parent — suffers from chronic pain syndrome, please know that treating them as lazy or accusing them of faking it will only make things worse. Sometimes a warm word does more than a prescription. Sometimes holding someone's hand, massaging their shoulders, driving to a nearby town and sharing a meal — these can be worth more than most medications.
My ninety-one-year-old mother sometimes calls to say her head hurts. I rush over and massage her shoulders and neck. She smiles almost right away and says she feels better. My sisters laugh and say she was faking it — that she just wanted to see her son. But I wonder: maybe her pain really did improve because her son showed up, sat beside her, held her hands, and rubbed her neck — sending her oxytocin levels up in the process.
If you know someone living with chronic pain, gently encourage them to get out and see people, even when it hurts. Meet friends. Have a good meal together. Watch a movie and laugh. Go for an easy walk or run together. These may be some of the most effective pain relief available. If it is true that humans are social creatures at our core, then real happiness comes when we connect with others — when we share emotions and allow ourselves to be known. Yes, relationships also bring hurt. But if we shut ourselves away to avoid that hurt, we may end up feeling a far greater pain: the pain of being completely alone. Let us find the courage to appreciate the people already in our lives a little more, and to reach out to new people a little more openly. Oxytocin will be there to help, every step of the way.