Pain too

My pain threshold has certainly changed over the years.

Watching my daughter react to sunburn, bindi-eyes, mildly hot asphalt, dried salty skin, sand in her bed and cracked lips; I recall that these things used to hurt me, or at the very least annoy me. Now they hardly register a blip.

My guess is that as we age our brain decides to attenuate the signal resulting from the processing of nerve responses. When we are young the brain has yet to determine whether these signals are from life threatening events, but later on it knows that they are not.

Also, once we have reproduced maybe the brain thinks the outcomes are less important and then we can choose to give ourselves a break. I don’t think this choice is conscious and clearly not everyone makes it.