When You Don’t Feel Pain: Why the Ability to Hurt Actually Saves Your Life

Not feeling pain might sound like a dream—especially if you live with chronic pain—but pain is one of the body’s most important protective systems. People with congenital insensitivity to pain often break bones, burn themselves, and never know it. Understanding why pain exists reveals just how vital those “ouch” signals really are.

To those of us who live with chronic pain, the idea of not feeling pain can sound like a dream. Imagine waking up without aching joints, without burning nerves, without that familiar throb. Bliss, right?

But now imagine something else:

You break your leg and don’t realize it. You keep walking on it, craving the sensation of pressure or impact, unknowingly grinding the bone fragments together until you cause permanent damage. You might never walk normally again.

This is the reality for people with congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP)—a rare condition where pain signals never reach the brain. Across the internet, there are striking stories of individuals with CIP who repeatedly injure themselves without knowing it. Some of my favorites are here:

But instead of focusing on the stories, I want to talk about what’s happening in the nerves themselves. Why does pain exist? What goes wrong when it disappears? And what does that teach those of us who do feel pain—sometimes too much of it?

Pain Is Protective, Not Punitive

Pain isn’t punishment. Pain is information.

It warns you when tissues are being damaged so you can change your behavior before permanent harm occurs.

Let’s start with something simple: a bath.

You run the water, drop in your favorite bath bomb, and get ready to slide in. You dip your toes into the water and—ouch—it’s too hot. Instantly, your foot retreats.

You turn on some cold water, swirl it around, and eventually the temperature feels just right. You sink in for fifteen relaxing minutes.

Now imagine you couldn’t feel that initial “too hot” signal.

You might step straight into scalding water, unaware your skin is burning. And because you don’t feel the burn, you might stay in long enough to do serious damage—deep burns, infection, long-term disability.

That single sensory moment—the instant your toes touch water—depends on a beautifully orchestrated chain of events in your nervous system.

What Actually Happens When You Feel “Ouch”

When your toes hit water that’s too hot, specialized sensory neurons called nociceptors detect the danger. These neurons generate tiny electrical signals called action potentials, which travel along long nerve fibers to the cluster of nerve cell bodies in your dorsal root ganglia (DRG). From there, the signals travel into the spinal cord and up to your brain.

Your brain interprets those signals as pain: “Ouch! Too hot!”

You move your foot away—automatically protecting your tissue.

That is what CIP takes away.

Why People With CIP Get Hurt

People with congenital insensitivity to pain still have sensations like touch or temperature, but their pain-signaling pathway is broken. Without pain, they often:

bite or chew their tongues and lips
walk on broken bones
suffer repeated infections
burn themselves severely
develop joint deformities
die young from untreated injuries

Not feeling pain removes one of the body’s most essential survival systems.

Zooming In: How Neurons Fire (and What Goes Wrong in CIP)

A resting neuron sits at a negative membrane voltage. There are lots of sodium ions outside the cell and far fewer inside. When a neuron fires an action potential, it’s because sodium ions rush into the cell through voltage-gated sodium channels, rapidly flipping the membrane voltage from negative to positive.

One of the most important channels for starting this process is NaV1.7.

NaV1.7 is like the ignition key: if it doesn’t turn, the car doesn’t start.

In many people with CIP, NaV1.7 is mutated in a way that makes it a loss-of-function channel. That means:

It doesn’t open properly.
Sodium ions can’t flood into the neuron.
The neuron never reaches the threshold to fire an action potential.
Pain signals never travel to the brain.

A few other ion channels have been implicated in CIP, but NaV1.7 is the star of the show. If you break this one channel, you essentially switch off pain at its source.

Why This Matters—Even If Pain Feels Like a “Pain in the Butt”

Understanding CIP makes you appreciate something most of us take for granted: the ability to hurt.

Pain can be exhausting. It can interfere with work, relationships, sleep, happiness—everything. Chronic pain especially can feel senseless, overwhelming, and unfair.

But the existence of pain itself is deeply protective. It’s a warning system that keeps your body intact.

People with CIP remind us that a world without pain isn’t bliss—it’s dangerous.

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