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Sometimes I will start thinking that I'm stressed and my heart rate will increase as I start to feel miserable and sort of "lose agency" in the sense that I will begin to engage in mildly self-destructive behaviors such as playing a videogame when I should be working. These periods are generally caused by real stressors, but without fail I can introspect a bit and notice that most of my behavior comes because I am pretending to be stressed. When I simply ignore it and deny that I'm stressed at all, the stress generally goes away and I just get back to work, no harm done.
I wouldn't necessarily call this a cultural illness, though culture certainly has an effect. It's more that I think our brains don't perfectly record their own thoughts, so we as humans are particularly bad at interpreting and explaining our own emotions, memories, behaviors, etc. in ways that can compound on themselves. I have noticed this in myself in many different areas. Basically any time I seem to be making bad choices, I can reason through why those choices are being made and come to the conclusion that I seem to be emulating what I think someone else would do, e.g. I feel like I must be stressed out so I'm emulating a stressed person, or same for someone who is angry or sad.
That said, I have experienced chronic pain (but do not currently) and that was definitely 100% real. Certainly it can be psychosomatic for some people but let's be clear that it often has a purely physical cause.
It can absolutely have a physical cause, but more than a few months and I'd be willing to bet it's mostly psychosomatic. My understanding is that most chronic pain starts with an acute injury and spirals from there. The brain feels the body get hurt, tenses up, and a vicious cycle ensues.
At the end of the day the line between the two is blurry.
As far as I am aware one leading explanation isn't that it really is psychosomatic in the regular sense but rather than the system for sending pain signals from the spinal cord to the brain gets messed up by and self triggering from having some sort of long term pain, which leads to it continuing sending signals to the brain despite the injury healing.
The brain isn't at fault, it receives real signals, it's just that the signals doesn't have a injury as a cause (any more).
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Eh, I think this one is genuinely real. As for other types of chronic pain, I'd be willing to believe they're mostly psychosomatic, but it's hard to know for sure without having experienced it. Sorry to be the "well acktually" guy but there really are real sources of chronic pain.
Hah you’re fine. I think the terminology here is mostly to blame, “real” and “psychosomatic” don’t really map onto what we’re getting at. Maybe culturally-induced vs mechanical?
Sure, IDK if it's really "cultural" though, psychosomatic seems more accurate. I think even if you were a hermit with absolutely no culture you could still fool yourself into a lot of these things.
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