Feeling less pain than the people around you is more common than you might think, and it rarely points to a single cause. Your pain threshold, the point at which a sensation registers as painful, is shaped by a mix of genetics, hormones, psychological traits, physical fitness, and nerve function. Some of these factors you’re born with; others shift throughout your life.
Your Genes Set the Baseline
The strongest influence on how much pain you feel is genetic. A gene called SCN9A provides the blueprint for a sodium channel known as NaV1.7, which sits on the surface of pain-sensing nerve cells called nociceptors. These channels act like tiny gates: when they open, sodium ions rush in and trigger an electrical signal that travels to your brain, where it registers as pain. Variations in this single gene can dial that signal up or down dramatically.
Some people carry SCN9A variants that make the NaV1.7 channel harder to open. Fewer sodium ions flow in, weaker signals reach the brain, and pain feels muted. In extreme cases, certain mutations produce completely nonfunctional channels, blocking pain signals entirely. This condition, called congenital insensitivity to pain, is estimated to affect roughly one in a million people in the UK. It sounds like a superpower, but it’s dangerous: people who can’t feel pain accumulate injuries, broken bones, joint deformities, infections, and even vision loss from eye injuries they never noticed. Children with the condition often bite through their lips or burn themselves without reacting.
On the flip side, other SCN9A variants make the channel open too easily or stay open too long, flooding nociceptors with sodium and amplifying pain signals. These variants are responsible for conditions involving extreme burning pain and account for about 30 percent of cases of small fiber neuropathy, a nerve disorder that causes burning, tingling, and heightened sensitivity.
A rarer genetic discovery involves a gene called FAAH-OUT. One well-documented patient carries a deletion in this gene that effectively shuts down the production of an enzyme responsible for breaking down the body’s natural cannabis-like compounds, particularly anandamide. With that enzyme silenced, anandamide builds up to unusually high levels. The result: near-complete pain insensitivity, minimal anxiety, fast wound healing, and a notably happy disposition. This same molecular pathway also boosted levels of a protein that protects against depression. It’s a vivid example of how a single genetic quirk can reshape an entire pain experience.
Hormones Shift Your Pain Threshold
If your pain sensitivity seems to fluctuate, hormones are a likely explanation. Estrogen and progesterone both modulate how your body processes pain, and their levels change constantly throughout the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause.
During the first half of the menstrual cycle, rising estrogen promotes the release of endorphins, the body’s built-in painkillers. This improves pain tolerance through the same opioid pathways that prescription painkillers target. In the second half, progesterone rises and estrogen falls. Progesterone has its own protective role: it enhances the activity of a calming brain chemical called GABA, which helps dampen pain signaling. But when progesterone drops sharply just before menstruation, the resulting inflammatory response can spike pain sensitivity. During menstruation itself, both hormones hit their lowest point, and many people experience their highest pain sensitivity of the entire cycle.
After menopause, the sustained decline in both estrogen and progesterone tends to lower pain thresholds overall. This means that if you’re younger and have higher baseline hormone levels, you may genuinely tolerate pain better than an older version of yourself will.
Psychological Traits Play a Larger Role Than You’d Expect
Your personality doesn’t just affect how you talk about pain. It changes how intensely you actually feel it. Research comparing people with high versus low pain sensitivity found that two psychological traits stood out as the clearest dividing lines: catastrophizing and neuroticism.
Catastrophizing is the tendency to ruminate on pain, magnify it, and feel helpless about it. People who scored high on catastrophizing reported significantly more pain from the same experimental stimuli. Neuroticism, a trait defined by emotional instability and a tendency toward negative feelings, was positively correlated with both catastrophizing and pain sensitivity scores. The relationship works like a chain: neuroticism fuels catastrophizing, and catastrophizing amplifies the pain experience.
If you’re someone who tends to stay calm, doesn’t dwell on discomfort, and feels a general sense of control over your body, you likely score lower on both traits. That psychological profile is associated with genuinely reduced pain perception, not just a tougher exterior. Interestingly, the study also found that extraverts reported higher pain sensitivity, which runs counter to the common assumption that outgoing people are “tougher.”
Exercise Raises Your Pain Threshold
Regular physical activity doesn’t just distract you from pain. It triggers a measurable neurological shift called exercise-induced hypoalgesia, a temporary reduction in pain sensitivity following movement. Research has shown this effect kicks in at surprisingly low levels of effort. Even a light static muscle contraction held at just 25 percent of maximum strength for three minutes was enough to reduce the brain’s sensitivity to repeated pain signals. The effect appears to work by dialing down the central nervous system’s tendency to amplify pain over time, a process called temporal summation.
If you’re physically active, especially if you exercise consistently, your resting pain threshold is likely higher than someone who is sedentary. This is one of the most modifiable factors on the list. It also helps explain why people who stop exercising after an injury often feel like their pain tolerance drops: it literally does.
Nerve Damage Can Numb You
Reduced pain sensation isn’t always a gift from your genes or your gym routine. Sometimes it’s a sign of nerve damage. Small fiber neuropathy is a condition in which the thinnest nerve fibers, the ones responsible for transmitting pain, temperature, and itch signals, gradually deteriorate. Early symptoms often include numbness, tingling, or a strange “wooden” feeling in the feet, sometimes described as walking on sand or pebbles.
The pattern typically starts in the toes and feet and slowly creeps upward, though in some cases it appears in patches across the trunk, face, scalp, or hands. What makes this tricky is that the same condition can cause both reduced sensation in some areas and heightened pain in others. If you’ve noticed that certain parts of your body seem oddly numb while others have become more sensitive, small fiber neuropathy is worth investigating. It can be caused by diabetes, autoimmune conditions, certain SCN9A gene variants, or sometimes no identifiable cause at all.
What Low Pain Sensitivity Means for Your Health
Feeling less pain can be genuinely useful. You recover from minor injuries without much fuss, dental work doesn’t faze you, and everyday bumps that send others reaching for ice barely register. But it comes with a real tradeoff: pain exists to warn you that something is wrong. People with significantly blunted pain perception are more likely to walk around on a broken foot, ignore an infected wound, or miss the early signs of a serious internal problem.
Joint injuries are a particular concern. Without pain to signal that something is damaged, people continue using the joint, worsening the injury until it becomes a permanent deformity with limited range of motion. Chronic infections from wounds that never got treated are another common complication. Even eye injuries, which would normally cause enough pain to send someone to a doctor, can progress to vision loss if the person never felt them happen.
If you recognize yourself in any of these descriptions, the practical takeaway is simple: build habits that compensate for what pain would normally tell you. Check your body regularly for injuries you might not have felt. Don’t skip medical evaluations after falls or impacts just because nothing hurts. And if your reduced pain sensitivity is new or worsening, rather than something you’ve had your whole life, that shift itself is worth paying attention to.