Pain tolerance is entirely subjective

Yesterday I got a spliter, nasty one, from an old piece of furniture. About 1/16th or thereabouts piece of wood that I hit at just the right angle so it decided to dig in between my nail and the finger, and it was nearly long enough to go all the way to the nail bed.

Asked my wife for her tweezers, to get out a splinter, and she offered to help. Until she saw the piece of wood through my nail, which prompted an "are you kidding?!" response and I could tell that she was already starting to regret offering to help.

Now, my wife has endured labor pains, but here she was freaking out over a piece of wood jammed between my finger and the nail, and wondering why I am able to be so calm. It hurt, but by this time a minute or so had passed and the initial pain had subsided and now I just needed to get it out.

I have heard stories about how women have a higher pain tolerance. I have also heard that memories of pain are not entirely reliable under various circumstances. All that such an event had provided anecdotal evidence for is that nobody really knows anything universally applicable about the feeling of pain.

There are things like the sensation itself, the signals being sent to the brain, and trauma to tissues which starts the whole process off, but there's not much else that can be said universally. Even the same person, under different circumstances, yet experiencing the same trauma, will not feel the same.

What to take from this?

Avoid projecting your own response to pain in a particular circumstance onto someone else. Boring advice, but true nonetheless because the perception of pain is not objectively quantifiable. What is not painful to one person might be to another, or even the same person at different points in time, so when dealing with folks that are in pain of one kind or another, just know that the odds are against them reacting the way they are for the same reasons you would.

Doesn't mean they aren't, but being aware of the tendency to presume that other people act and think like us can result in awkward misunderstandings.