19/06/2026
Moments before walking into a meeting, I put my phone on silent. At that exact moment, a message from my daughter flashed up:
"Teddy has been..."
And that was all I saw before my phone disappeared into my bag.
Teddy is my cat.
In less than a second, my brain took those three words and confidently finished the story. Teddy had been run over. Hit by a car. Rushed to the emergency vet. Did my husband even know where it was? By this point, my brain was practically planning the funeral.
Quite impressive predicting, really... considering it was based on three words and absolutely no facts.
After a few minutes of internal panic, I remembered to use the tools I teach others. I focused on what I actually knew. The facts were simple: I had seen three words and nothing more. So I waited until the meeting ended before reading the message properly.
The full message?
"Teddy has been having a big fuss," followed by a video of him happily purring on my daughter's lap. In fact, he was the first to greet me when I got home later that day.
This is what brains do. They are prediction machines. Rather than waiting for all the information, the brain constantly uses past experiences, memories, emotions and learned associations to make its best guess about what is happening and what might happen next.
The same process can play a role in chronic pain.
When pain persists, the brain can become highly skilled at predicting danger. It may interpret normal sensations, movements or activities as threatening, even when tissues are healthy and there is no ongoing damage. The pain is real, but the prediction can be inaccurate—much like my brain's dramatic Teddy storyline.
The brain isn't trying to deceive us; it's trying to protect us. But sometimes protection is based on outdated information rather than current reality.
Recovery often involves helping the brain gather new evidence, updating old predictions and learning that not every sensation signals danger.
Sometimes the story our brain tells us isn't the whole truth.
