Rewiring The Brain For A Pain-Free Life: The Mind-Body Approach To Healing With Dan Buglio
29:21 Share

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast. My guest today is author Dan Buglio. He has a website called painfreeu.com. That's also the book. He's an, again, author, content creator, currently is in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Dan had chronic pain many years ago, back pain and sciatica since his 30s and has learned not only to just deal with it, but to get himself to a point where he likely is pain-free.

And that's what his book is about. And we're going to go into that and Dan's story. So welcome, Dan. Thank you so much, Richard. Appreciate you inviting me onto your podcast. Yeah. And I know you get asked this a billion times, but if you would just tell me your story of pain, what happened to you? So in my early thirties, you know, typical life, young kid, stressful job, long commute, renting a house, talking about having a second kid. Life was stressful. Married. Yeah,

And, you know, marriage was good, but, you know, no marriage is perfect. And bent over to put on my underwear one morning in Wales, had a major back spasm. And that began 13 long years of back pain and sciatica. I actually heard about this Dr. Sarno, who, what was his name? Howard Stern was talking about on the radio. Dr. Sarno in New York City helped Howard Stern get rid of his pain. And so that began past 25 years of fascination into the mind-body concept for pain and sciatica.

Took me a long time to figure it out, even though I bought all of Sarna's books. But eventually, after 13 years, I was able to end my pain. I've been chronic pain-free ever since. And that's been going on now 13, 14 years without any back pain or sciatica. Oh, wow. So there is a cure. The cool part is it has to do more with what the actual cause is.

of symptoms are more so than techniques to resolve those. People think chronic pain is caused by the body, a flaw in the body, and that's not always true. So the whole concept is that the brain controls the entire nervous system, including pain, and if the brain perceives danger, it will turn pain on, and once it turns it on, it can sometimes get stuck on if the brain continues to perceive that there's a problem. So is that how pain can go from acute to chronic then?

Correct. Yeah. I mean, most chronic pain is a mistake made by the brain. And the reason for that is because the body heals. What injury have you ever sustained as a kid or growing up that did not heal? Body heal. You break a bone, they set it, it heals. You cut yourself, it heals. You burn yourself, it heals. The body is a healing mechanism. So chronic pain almost doesn't make sense under

under the framework that the body heals. So the brain with enough fear and attention can keep symptoms going for years or decades. Have you ever dealt with phantom limb pain? This sounds kind of like your techniques may work there as well. Well, phantom limb pain is just more proof that if the brain perceives there's an issue, it can create pain in a limb that's not even there. And phantom limb was something that Dr. Sarno spoke about early in his books as just more evidence that

that the brain is what's controlling the pain system. I don't actually deal with people with phantom limb pain because that would be an extremely small number of people, but we deal with anybody with any type of chronic pain, ailments, vertigo, dizziness, gastric distress, migraines, all sorts of long-time chronic conditions are very often caused by a brain perceiving danger and not necessarily an illness or a flaw in the body. I would guess there's certain ventilators

brain disorders or personality types that would have a harder time with chronic pain. You know, it seems like society is, on the whole, a lot more anxious and worried. So I would think that chronic pain has probably been on the rise quite a bit. I don't know if you've seen that or not, or is that not true? Well, I think in the United States alone, probably something like 25 to 30 percent of the population has some type of chronic ailment.

whether it be pain or something else, it's an enormous, you know, an enormous percentage of the population has something going on. Yeah, that's crazy. Why do you think that took you so long to when you read it? You said you got all those books, you went through all this material, but it still took you 13 years. Like what happened during that time? What did you try?

Well, I was following the guidelines in Dr. Sarno's books. You know, you talk to your brain, you think psychologically. His whole theory was that repressed emotions, primarily anger and rage, were perceived by the brain as dangerous. And if they were getting close to the surface, sometimes the brain would turn on symptoms like pain to distract us from these emotions that it had previously learned were not cool, not safe. And so, you

You know, I bought into the concept. I got rid of the pain, but it came back and then I'd get rid of it again. It would come back again. Then it would stay and then it would get harder and harder. And then I would get frustrated. I would get cautious. I would, you know, I would avoid certain activities and movements. I became the guy in the neighborhood at work and in my family with back pain. Hey, Dan, how's your back? How's your back? How's your back? All the while, all those things we're doing was confirming with the brain that I had a problem. So the brain kept perceiving danger and kept the pain going.

And accidentally after 13 years, I was able to implement a bunch of things that in hindsight now are what I teach people these days. So we need to teach, train that we're safe. So what's an example of a typical case that will come to you? You know, how would someone describe it? Well,

Well, I mean, anybody with any type of chronic ailment. Somebody could have chronic dizziness, vertigo, migraines, stomach distress, reflux, back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, any type of body pains. There's all sorts of neuropathies. There's neuralgias, pudendal, there's bladder pains, frequency, urgency, you name it.

If a symptom starts and there's enough fear and attention given to that symptom, very often the brain will perceive, oh, this is an ongoing problem and keep that symptom going long term. So it could be just, you know, run of the mill, somebody's got to store back. But

But it could be any number of those things that I just described. Again, the body heals. Its natural state is not illness or pain or symptoms. But a terrified brain doesn't generally operate the human body effectively or efficiently and can keep the false alarms ringing for years or decades. But are there times when the alarm is not ringing? I mean, you weren't in constant pain, were you, for 13 years or were you...

I mean, I was able to sleep. So when I was sleeping, there was no pain. There was times when I could get comfortable sitting in a chair a certain way and it would be off. But then when I would get up and I'd straighten my back, it would hurt again. So, yeah, it depends. Everybody's a little bit different.

When the brain perceives safety, for example, I was sitting comfortably on a couch, brain says, oh, we're good here. But I was terrified of standing up and straightening out my back because that always hurt. And so the pain is, in my opinion, the interpretation of the brain of what is going on. It's an interpretation of the brain from the nervous system, the sensations coming from the nervous system in the body. And if it's viewed from a lens of danger or threat, the alarm goes on. Any

And again, it can go on and stay on for a long time. When it onsets, do you think there's a particular thought process that goes on? Like how quickly can their brain generate pain if it feels endangered? Does this happen, Ian, with that provocation or is there like a series of steps that occur? Well, the brain, the brain's primary job is safety and survival.

So the brain can turn on pain in a microsecond if it perceives danger. Just imagine the last time you touched a hot stove by accident or, you know, the side of the oven by, you know, for example. The pain is there before we even have any conscious thought. The subconscious and the brain is controlling it. Instantly, the brain is screaming, get your hand off the stove and you get a sharp pain instantaneously.

instantly. You pull your hand away, you look at it. Okay, I'm not burnt. Where's the pain? It's already turned off. All right. So the brain is responsible for warning us against dangers. In the case of chronic pain, it perceives the danger as ongoing. So there's no particular thought process. The brain's going to do what the brain does. But sometimes an onset of

Pain can come about from lots of life stress, death of a parent, divorce, lost your job, money problems, relationship problems, all sorts of different. You know, we've all met somebody whose life is kind of in chaos. There's always something bad going on. And in some cases, the brain can perceive that as the danger and start falling.

firing up symptoms. And most people that I deal with can kind of look back at the onset of their symptoms and say, oh, yeah, you had a lot going on. And we can kind of correlate it to what's considered a mind-body condition, which means life stress perceived as dangerous can start symptoms. But then, Richard, the challenge is that once we have symptoms, we kind of get looped into the medical system to try to figure out what's

what's causing these symptoms and how to fix them, how to get rid of them. And in many cases, the medical system continues to perpetuate the fear because they don't necessarily have an answer as to why this 33-year-old guy named Dan had back pain from bending over to put his underwear on, right? They didn't have an answer. And so there was a lot of fear because I didn't have an answer. And even if they did, you know, injections, treatments, chiropractic, none of that stuff was working because I did not have a body problem. And so a lot of people get

you know, kind of looped into the medical system, which just creates more fear and frustration that I'm broken and even the doctors don't know what to do. So there's only a certain subset of people that are number one, open to these concepts because most people are very much in the medical paradigm. And so it's difficult

to say, wait, you're telling me my brain's causing the pain. My body's okay. And in actuality, for the vast majority of people, that's true for chronic symptoms, chronic pains. But some people are offended by that. What are you talking about? I have a real problem. My pain's real. I'm not imagining it. No, you're not imagining. The pain is very real, but it's just not caused by a flaw in the body. So that's

It's a complex process that is relatively simple once you understand. The mechanism is that when the brain perceives danger, symptoms can turn on. The solution is conveying to the brain consistently, incredibly, that we're actually okay.

Before we continue, I've been personally funding the Finding Genius podcast for four and a half years now, which has led to 2,700 plus interviews of clinicians, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and other amazing people who are working to advance science and improve our lives and our world. Even though this podcast gets 100,000 plus downloads a month, we need your help to reach hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Please visit findinggeniuspodcast.com and click on support us.

We have three levels of membership from $10 to $49 a month, including perks such as the ability to see ahead in our interview calendar and ask questions of upcoming guests, transcripts of podcasts you're interested in, the ability to request specific topics or guests, and more. Visit FindingGeniusPodcast.com and click support us today. Now back to the show.

Yeah. How do you, what was the first moment of breakthrough? What did it look like for you? It was a long journey. I mean, I, like I said, started hearing about Dr. Sarno, the pain would go away. Wonderful. I got this figured out. And then later it would come back and then it would go away and come back. So, you know, what I did 13, 14 years ago is almost less relevant than what I'm seeing going on with my coaching clients and with my audience in general. When people are able to convey when number one, they understand what causes symptoms.

the brain perceiving danger, there's a set of assessments that can be done which essentially see how the symptoms are behaving. If they behave a certain way, those are really strong indicators that the brain is creating the symptoms and not some illness or broken part of the body. So

I have a foundation of four items. What causes it? Does it apply to me? Is there a solution? And am I capable of implementing that solution? And once you have that foundation laid, it becomes a matter of knowing what's going on, responding to symptoms calmly, expecting things to go better, resuming activities, right? Because a lot of people get, you know, I deal with a lot of people who are literally on bed rest because they're

in pain all the time and they're terrified to move because it might cause more pain. And so we've got lots of people going from situations where they're on bed rest and resuming life, getting back to full activity, pain-free. So it's a fascinating concept, not one that I've invented or created or discovered, but one that I've kind of, I'll say, expanded upon through the work of Dr. Sarnoff. So he's the one who got me started on it and

and I've been studying it and paying attention and learning and researching. And I've been teaching daily online YouTube and Facebook videos for nearly six years now, every single day, getting tons of comments. So I now run a group coaching program where I've got, you know, four sessions a week where I'm interacting with people with symptoms and in real time coaching them and seeing how they're responding and watching these people start to get better and better over the weeks and months. And so I've got

what I call almost like a virtual laboratory where I can learn so much just by interacting with so many people with chronic conditions and almost testing out like, well, let's try this, let's try that and getting the feedback almost in real time from the audience and the coaching clients. So I've learned quite a bit

in the past six or seven years doing these daily videos that I could have never learned, you know, just studying the books from a couple decades ago. Well, is there an exercise you can do with listeners, you know, even though you can't get feedback from them? Anything you could do to help them? Well, understand that there is an explanation for their symptoms that doesn't necessarily involve MRIs, x-rays, blood tests.

It's not an exercise per se, but there are certainly trainings that people can watch. I have a ton of free videos. There is a set of videos on my YouTube channel. I call it the Fast Start Playlist. And the very first video will go into depth, this concept of perceived danger causing pain or symptoms. So for the listeners, if they would like to understand and learn a little bit more, they can go to Dan's Fast Start.

Start.com and start watching a series of videos. And that'll walk them through understanding what's creating symptoms, figuring out if it applies to them, because symptoms coming from the brain behave differently from a body problem. And so there's an assessment and that Fast Start walks them through.

And once they understand what's causing it, the rest of the Fast Start playlist will offer suggestions on how to convey safety. It's a little bit more involved than I can kind of cover in a short podcast, but there are absolutely resources that would be available to your listeners. Well, that's great. You mentioned that pain from the brain manifests differently from maybe actual physical pain. How would someone tell where it's coming from? How would they identify that? Well,

Again, there's a series of questions that have been developed over decades of clinical practice, first from Dr. Sarno and then from a number of other medical doctors that studied under Dr. Sarno. So for example, pain that moves, pain that turns on and off. When I say pain that moves, it could be the front of the knee to the back of the knee to the right of the knee. Could all still be in the knee, but it's still moving to a degree. Sometimes we have pain on the

both sides of our body, bilateral, which is very unlikely in the case of an injury that we have the identical pains on both sides of our body and the identical injury. Sometimes pain will rise up

under very stressful situations. It'll calm down or go away completely when somebody goes on vacation, which that doesn't make sense if you got a bad back, right? So there's indicators in how the symptoms behave that really strongly point to a brain perceiving danger as opposed to an illness or damage in the body. So there are characteristics. I cover a full assessment on my website as well as in the book. And so there's...

There's ways of determining, you know, I've had pain for 20 years. What's mine doing? Well, the questions will ask you and give you the opportunity to see how your pain behaves. Are there certain kinds of pain that are resistant to this process or that you haven't been able to help people with? I think if the pain is behaving like brain created, then we can turn it off. The rule of thumb here, Richard, is if somebody's got

something going on, the rule of thumb is go rule out anything significant, critical, life-threatening. All right, you got chest pain, go to the doctor, have your heart checked out. You can't breathe, you know, go to the ER, make sure they check out your lungs. Make sure there's no cancers, tumors, infections, right? We want to be very wise. Go see your doctor first. But if they give you a

reasonably clean bill of health and say, no, you're not sick. You're not dying. There's no tumors, cancers, infections. You got a body pain. There's no fracture. Then we can say, okay, nothing. I'll

I'll say serious or catastrophic going on. Now we can start evaluating the symptoms and say, how are they behaving? And that way you've got the best of both worlds because you're ruling out, hey, doc, am I dying? No, you're not dying. Go home. You're fine. You may still be hurting a lot, but at least you have ruled out anything significant that may, well, that would need to be dealt with by the medical profession. But the assessments can really help rule in the mind-body condition or the brain-caused condition.

set of symptoms. Will mind pain, will it amplify pre-existing pain? Do they work together? Is that where the brain learns sometimes how to, you know, put people into pain in a particular area? Well, there's no, there's no rhyme or reason why I had back pain and somebody else had headaches or migraines, right? There's no way to figure that out.

Can fear amplify existing pain? Sure, you break an arm and you're terrified and you're freaked out and you're staring at it and you're witnessing the symptoms and the pain all the time. You'll probably suffer more than the person who goes, okay, broken arm, it's in a cast. Let me just trust that it'll heal and I'm going to go about my day and do my best not to bang that into the desk, right? Fear can amplify normal bodily injury pain. Case in point,

The lady I worked with years ago was telling me that she had knee surgery. She was reluctant to go into it. She thought the knee was probably okay, but was kind of pushed into surgery. And it was likely that

this perceived danger pain, meaning the brain was creating it. It was likely that, but she was pushed into surgery. After surgery, she was shocked at the post-surgical pain and she freaked out. She thought the surgeons botched her surgery. Four MRIs later, six knee doctors later, everybody says your knee looks perfect. There's nothing wrong with it. But because she freaked out, she

She taught her own brain that she had a bad day, which meant every time she climbed the stairs or walked far, it was screaming in pain. The post-surgical pain was real. The body healed, which meant the pain should have gone away based on this particular person's fear and focus on the symptoms.

And most importantly, the decision she made that the surgeon screwed it up and therefore she had a permanent problem is why the brain turned on the symptom and kept that alarm, the false alarm ringing for years, right? Misinformation can cause the brain to perceive danger where there is none. Surgery had healed. Six doctors told her it healed, but

But yet, because of her decision about the surgery, her brain kept the pain on. So we have to get really down to the crux of, okay, do you, Richard, have perceived danger pain? Because if you have a body pain, it should heal. And if it hasn't in six weeks, six months, then most likely your brain is involved in the perpetuation of the symptom. So this lady, did she work with you and did you coach her and were you able to help her? This was a person who was interacting through Facebook. And I

I don't know her outcome because every time I would try to convince her that, you know, she's got to really look at how the symptoms are behaving and that perhaps her knee was not permanently damaged by the surgeon. She'd get very defensive and didn't like me so much. So,

The people that are able to get better are the ones who would like to understand the true root cause of the symptoms, but you can't help everybody. And the people who struggle the most to get better are the ones who are still filled with doubt. You know, the doctor must have missed something. Maybe I need another MRI. Maybe I need another blood test. I still feel awful. The symptoms are too severe. You can't be telling me my brain is doing all this. And so the resistance to the

The syndrome is part of the syndrome. The people who get better look at it factually, do the assessments and make a decision that, okay, this makes complete sense and they commit to it and then they can begin teaching their brain, I'm actually okay, I'm actually safe. And so,

It's those people who are able to look at the facts and separate themselves from the fear. This is really not fixing body parts, Richard. What we are doing here is recovering from misinformation and fear. And when you do that, the brain can learn to turn off these false alarms. And it does it reliably well, predictably. Well, let's say that, you know, you have a pain and you're like, okay, sounds like from what you're saying, it's coming from my brain. But I'm

I don't know. I just had this part of me doesn't believe it. You know, can I sabotage my own recovery? Or as long as I'm kind of open to thinking that this is possible, I can recover. Yeah. Now there's obviously a learning curve up front. The first time people hear about this, most likely they scoff at it and say, oh, this is ridiculous. Right. Right.

Many times people would say they got Dr. Sarno's book and they threw it across the room. This guy is crazy. I have real pain. So there's a lot of stories over many decades of people who initially reject this, but eventually come back around to picking the book off the floor and start reading it again and start to understand.

learn what's possible. So yeah, there's a lot of reluctance and yeah, you can sabotage your own recovery because if you don't believe that's what's going on, it's going to be hard to convince your brain otherwise that you're actually okay and safe. Well, even after you acknowledge that it could be from your brain or it probably is, do you have to go through like a series of relaxation techniques or?

meditation or anything to get to get the beneficial effect? So there are many people in this mind body space who recommend practices like breathwork meditation. There's a process called somatic tracking where you observe your pain from a standpoint of curiosity. And I generally don't

look at those things as required. And the reason I say that is because I got better without doing these practices. I tried. I did meditation. I did breath work. It never worked for me because those practices by default don't necessarily convey that I'm safe. It may settle things down a little bit. It may

calm the whole system down by doing meditation. But if I still think I got a bad back, the brain's going to keep the pain on. So there's a certain amount of this that's knowledge therapy. What is going on? How does the human system work? How does the nervous system work? How does pain work? What's the lever determining if it's on or off? It's safety or danger. And so there's kind of an evolution of, well, I'm hearing about it. I better learn about it.

And once you get a certain amount of knowledge, then you can begin doing things like some self-talk, reminding yourself you're okay. Hey, the pain's really high today, but...

I know what's causing it. I know it's temporary because I know it's my brain falsely turning on the alarms. And over time, with consistency, I encourage people to panic less, freak out less. Because when you're in a high degree of pain, it's really easy to panic and freak out and think catastrophically that my entire future is over because I've got this pain. But

As you start learning about it and as you start implementing these things, you start to realize that by expecting the best and responding as calmly and unbothered as possible, we can start to influence the pain levels almost in real time. And when people start to see, wow, you know what? My mindset's been really solid. My clarity is crystal clear. I know what's causing it and I'm not hurting as much.

Wow, that's kind of cool. And then they start to get the aha moment like, wow, I'm really not broken. And then they can dive in a little bit deeper and get more consistent. And there's no set time frame. I've seen people get better and eliminate 37 years of back pain in six weeks. And I've seen other people take years to do it, kind of like I did.

Because I made every mistake possible. It sounds like anxiety may be amenable to some of these techniques. Because anxiety seems to be something that's just, you know, created in the mind. Have you ever looked into ancillary topics? Techniques could be used. Anxiety is absolutely a symptom created by a brain perceiving danger. I mean, anxiety, panic attacks. What's underlying that?

fear. So yeah, there's many people who have these chronic pains or other chronic ailments who are also very anxiety stricken. And as they start to convey safety consistently to the brain, anxiety can lift as well. So yeah, this can have benefit on anxieties, depressions, not all mental health conditions, because some of those are a lot deeper than this, but

You know, anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, a lot of that is driven by fear. And so if the brain starts to feel more and more safe, a lot of those things can improve considerably. Okay. Is there any advanced aspects to your course or your work that certain people need? The process is pretty straightforward. And I've got lots of people getting better just by watching my free daily videos. So it's not as if they need to come join a high-end program for six weeks and

pay thousands of dollars. Everything that's required to get better is for free on YouTube and Facebook. Right.

And I coach daily in a, you know, anywhere from a six to 12 minute video. So Dan's YouTube.com people can follow along on the daily videos. But lots of people are getting better with that. I don't think there's like a level one recovery and then you need to step into level two. I think it's all just one big process of convey safety consistently, consistently, credibly to the point where it outweighs the brain's

misinformation and false perception of danger. And, you know, you mentioned early on my book. I just published a book a month ago called Pain-Free You. And the book walks you from start to finish on what's causing it, how to do the assessments, how to convey safety to the brain, you know, how self-esteem and how we treat ourselves is involved, how

how emotions are involved and teaching the brain that emotions are safe. I mean, it goes through pretty much everything you need. So that's a really good resource. Very inexpensive, you know, for the cost of a book. You get everything that you need to get better. Oh, that's excellent. Okay. Well, very good. Well, Dan, so the best way for people to do it, to get in touch with you or to experience what you have to offer is go to YouTube and watch some of your videos and your coachings. There's a lot there. They can get paid for you. You just came out with a month ago.

Any other resources for them? Well, the website is painfreyou.com and there's some resources there. But the book, I think, is a really good soup to nuts introduction and solution to what's going on and what to do about it.

If you're not a reader, it's on audiobook. So Audible, Spotify, you can find it there under Pain Free You. But if you just want to poke around and watch a couple videos, dansfaststart.com is a great introduction to the concepts. And the YouTube channel is dansyoutube.com. It'll bring you right into my channel. But

Tons of free resources. And I know that people get better. Got over 100 success stories on my channel already, and many of which never paid me a dime. A lot of them just got better by the way. That's really cool. Yeah, it's really a humbling thing to be able to help so many people. Do you have pain doctors out for your blood? No, as a matter of fact, no.

You know, some of them are sending me clients. It's fascinating. It's cool. There was a doctor in Germany who I met at a workshop. He says, oh, yeah, you know, your name and YouTube channel is on a list of resources I give to any of my chronic pain patients. This is a medical doctor. So I even have a couple of success stories from medical doctors who got better with my work. One was a chiropractor who got better with my work after his chiropractor couldn't get him better with his back pain. And so

It's really fascinating. The world is opening up to this idea. I know many of the people in my audience are giving my book as a gift to their physician. And some of the physicians are open-minded to it, fascinated, willing to read it. So that's great. It's not something you're going to find in medical school though. Okay. Well, very good. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and being open and honest about all this and doing what you do and helping people. Well, it's been my pleasure, Richard. Thank you so much.

If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs. If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com.

This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.