Suffering is caused by the distressing emotions associated with pain

The argument

Pain is a universally shared experience, but it is a complex sensory and emotional experience that can be endured in many different ways, varying from one person to the next. Even a person's own experience with pain can vary depending on the context of the pain or their psychological state. That variability is the first clue that pain and suffering are not the same thing: if the identical stimulus can be borne easily on one occasion and be unbearable on another, then something other than the stimulus is determining how bad it is. When a person is in pain, they receive a signal through the central nervous system indicating that something is wrong. That signal is the sensory component, and on its own it is only information. Suffering is the way a person reacts to physical or psychological pain, and it involves a person's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — the interpretation laid over the signal, which is where the distress actually lives. Suffering is an emotionally distressing experience that can lead to developing mental health disorders such as anxiety. And the relationship then runs in both directions, which is what makes the two so difficult to separate. People who suffer from anxiety can experience physical pain, including headaches, a pounding heart, muscle tension or twitches, and shortness of breath. The distress that began as a response to pain becomes a generator of new pain, and that new pain is felt exactly as bodily pain is felt, because it is bodily pain. Suffering can therefore be seen as both a cause and an effect of the emotions associated with feeling pain. It arises from pain and it also creates new pain, which means the two are interlinked rather than sequential — and it is why suffering is best understood as pain: not as something separate that follows from it, but as the form pain takes once a person has registered and responded to it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Suffering is a separate entity from pain. One can exist without the other. For example, athletes and sports enthusiasts such as runners, cyclists, and skiers understand the pain they experience from muscular fatigue is a sign that their workout has been effective and that their body is becoming stronger and more defined. Suffering can manifest from experiencing sadness, shame, or guilt without a person experiencing any pain. Suffering is a state of mind.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This describes pain rather than supporting the identification with suffering, and the definition already builds in the emotional dimension the conclusion is supposed to establish. [Rejecting P2] The definition is offered as a premise and does most of the argument's work. Whether suffering is best understood as a reaction to pain, or as a distinct state with its own independent causes, is precisely the question at issue. [Rejecting P3] Interlinkage cuts against identity rather than for it. Two things that can each produce the other are, for that very reason, two things. [Rejecting C] Counterexamples run in both directions. Athletes routinely accept considerable pain without suffering, reading it as evidence of progress, while grief, shame and humiliation produce suffering with no pain at all — so neither is sufficient for the other.