Body and Mind Pain Center

Body and Mind Pain Center The NESS clinic centers on the proper diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and prevention of musculoskeletal/orthopedic and spine injuries and conditions.

Dr. Nevo | DO, DABPMR, DABRM, RMSK
Founder & Medical Director | Body Mind Pain 💙🧠🦴
Integrative Pain, Sports & Regenerative Medicine 💪🔬
Healing from the inside out 🌱 Our practice provides effective non-surgical evidence-based treatments focusing on improvement of pain and optimizing the individual& #39;s unique functional goals.

Your nervous system reads the room before you do.I work with chronic pain patients every day, and there's this moment I ...
08/07/2026

Your nervous system reads the room before you do.

I work with chronic pain patients every day, and there's this moment I watch for.

Someone walks in carrying years of pain. Guarded, tense, braced against the world. Then something shifts when they feel genuinely seen and safe. Their shoulders drop. Breathing deepens.

Pain eases.

This isn't some wellness concept or positive thinking exercise. Your vagus nerve is doing exactly what it evolved to do, and the mechanisms are measurable.

When you make warm eye contact with someone you trust, your ventral vagal system activates. Oxytocin releases, cortisol drops, and your nervous system shifts from threat detection to safety mode. This shift directly activates descending inhibition, which is your brain's natural pain-blocking pathway.

Most pain treatments completely ignore this.

Polyvagal science shows us three neural circuits that govern how your body responds to the world: ventral vagal for connection and safety (healing happens here), sympathetic for fight or flight, and dorsal vagal for shutdown when threat feels overwhelming.

Your nervous system constantly scans for safety or danger through neuroception, a process that happens before conscious thought.

A calm voice. Steady eye contact. Unhurried presence... these cues tell your body you're safe here.

The research backs this up. Lower vagal tone predicts heightened pain sensitivity. Social isolation predicts worse pain outcomes beyond the intensity of pain itself. Women holding their partner's hand during pain testing reported significantly lower pain ratings than controls.

Your relationships directly interfere with your pain experience.

But here's the painful paradox I see constantly in my practice.

Trauma and chronic stress narrow your window of tolerance, making your neuroception hypersensitive. It detects threat everywhere, even when you're safe. You need connection to heal, but your nervous system interprets connection as dangerous.

This is where precise, gentle interventions matter.

Try this today: sit with someone whose presence helps you breathe easier and match your breathing rhythm to theirs for 2-3 minutes. Notice what shifts in your body. Or place your hand on your chest with gentle pressure while taking slow breaths, because your nervous system responds to your own touch the same way it responds to safe connection from others.

Small, repeated experiences of safety accumulate.

Your neuroception gets recalibrated.

I'm not saying connection cures everything. Chronic pain is complex and real. But your nervous system evolved to regulate through relationship. Co-regulation isn't optional... this is how we're wired. The research is clear, the mechanisms are measurable, and the interventions are testable.

Start where you are. Find one person who helps your system settle. Practice recognizing what safety feels like in your body.

Your pain is real, your nervous system is doing its job, and connection offers a path forward that most treatments completely ignore.

What's one relationship in your life that helps you breathe easier? 💙 Like & comment if you've noticed how being around certain people changes how your body feels.

There's no funeral for the body you lost.When someone dies, cards show up. People take time off work. When your own body...
08/02/2026

There's no funeral for the body you lost.

When someone dies, cards show up. People take time off work. When your own body disappears by inches over years, nobody does any of that.

No ritual. No one calls it grief, so you never let yourself.

I had a patient with hip pain. Her mother died around the same time the pain started.

She told me she felt allowed to grieve her mother. The hip was different. That one she was supposed to just handle.

I didn't have language for what I was hearing. Not for a long time.

The language came from a family therapist named Pauline Boss. She called it ambiguous loss. Loss without a clear ending, no moment where something says, this part is over.

Your nervous system keeps waiting for that signal. It never comes. So it stays on guard. And a body on guard hurts more.

Naming the losses is what starts to change that. Not fixing them. Just naming them.

The mornings you woke up without running math about how you'd move. The yes you used to give without calculating what it'd cost your body tomorrow. The version of you that could just show up.

I'm doing this myself right now. Some of what I kept calling fatigue this year turned out to be grief. I don't know all of what's in there yet.

Pick one loss this week. One. Say it out loud or write it down.

That's a ceremony. Small, but real.

Her MRI didn't change. Her pain went from a 4 to a 9.She'd lived with back pain for six years. Knew her triggers, had he...
07/27/2026

Her MRI didn't change. Her pain went from a 4 to a 9.

She'd lived with back pain for six years. Knew her triggers, had her routines. Usually a 4, bad days a 6.

Then her husband died. Heart attack. He was 53.

Six weeks later, she's in my office telling me her body is falling apart.

Same spine. Same scan. Pain more than doubled.

Here's what changed. Grief lights up the brain's reward system, the same circuits tied to craving and longing. Her brain was still reaching for him. Scanning rooms. Listening for his voice.

That reward system is also wired into your body's natural painkillers. Being held by someone you love releases chemicals that quiet pain signals. Lose the person, you lose that input.

One study of bereaved spouses found a 19% larger inflammation spike under stress in people carrying heavy grief. Inflammation turns pain signals up.

No new imaging was ever going to explain her nine.

Her back hadn't changed. Her nervous system was grieving.

If you've lost someone and your pain got louder, that's your biology responding to loss. You're not doing anything wrong.

This is Part 1 of a series on grief and pain. Listen to the full episode here.

'Just relax' is a pain myth.If you're highly sensitive and living with chronic pain, you've heard it a thousand times. J...
05/13/2026

'Just relax' is a pain myth.

If you're highly sensitive and living with chronic pain, you've heard it a thousand times. Just relax. Just breathe. Just calm down.

Here's what they miss: your nervous system is already working overtime.

It's not that you won't relax.

It's that you can't. Not yet.

Your nervous system has something called a window of tolerance - the amount of stress and stimulation you can handle before you tip into overwhelm. When you're in chronic pain, that window shrinks. Every sensation gets amplified. Every stressor hits harder.

Your system is scanning for threats 24/7 because it learned the world isn't safe.

So when someone tells you to "just relax," they're asking your nervous system to do something it literally cannot do in that moment. It's like telling someone drowning to just breathe normally. The system is stuck in protection mode, running a program it learned to keep you alive.

And it's not broken.

It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is, it's working with outdated information... a pattern of danger on repeat.

What you actually need isn't relaxation. You need regulation.

You need your nervous system to receive signals that it's safe to come down from high alert. You need to slowly expand that window of tolerance again, one small step at a time. That happens through co-regulation with safe people, through gentle movement that doesn't trigger threat responses, through understanding that your pain is real AND that your nervous system is creating it as a protective signal.

Not through forcing yourself to relax when your system is screaming danger.

So if you've ever felt like a failure because you "can't just relax," I need you to hear this.

You're not failing.

Your nervous system is doing its job. It just needs different support than what most people are offering. The path forward isn't about trying harder to relax - it's about building safety, one signal at a time.

💬 Have you been told to "just relax"? Comment below if this hits home. Let's change the conversation around what sensitive nervous systems actually need.

As a clinician-scientist, I see this daily: your nervous system can get stuck in a feedback loop where sensitivity ampli...
04/28/2026

As a clinician-scientist, I see this daily: your nervous system can get stuck in a feedback loop where sensitivity amplifies pain. This isn't imaginary, it's biology.

Here's what's happening.

Your nervous system has a threshold for activating pain signals. When you experience pain repeatedly, that threshold drops. Lower threshold means signals that used to be harmless now register as threats, so you become more sensitive.

But here's where it gets tricky... that increased sensitivity creates more pain signals, which lower the threshold even further, and the cycle continues.

You're not imagining that you're getting MORE sensitive over time.

You're experiencing central sensitization, a real neurobiological process where your nervous system learns to amplify danger signals. Think of it like a smoke alarm that keeps getting more sensitive - first it goes off when something's burning, then when you're cooking, eventually when you just walk past the kitchen.

The alarm isn't broken. It learned to be overprotective.

Your pain works the same way. The nervous system tags experiences with threat, drops its threshold for activation, and suddenly movements or sensations that used to be fine now trigger alarms. This is neuroplasticity working against you.

But understanding this mechanism changes your approach to healing. Because if your nervous system learned this pattern, it can learn a different one.

The goal isn't to eliminate all sensation or avoid movement... the goal is to recalibrate the threat detection system so it stops treating normal input as danger. That's where reappraisal, safety signals, and nervous system regulation come in - not as soft concepts, but as specific interventions that interrupt the feedback loop.

You're not broken.

You're stuck in a protective pattern that your brain learned to keep you safe. And patterns can be unlearned.

What's your experience with this? Have you noticed your sensitivity changing over time? Drop a comment if this resonates.

Your body isn't faulty. It's a smoke alarm.If you're highly sensitive, you already know this feeling.The world comes at ...
04/22/2026

Your body isn't faulty. It's a smoke alarm.

If you're highly sensitive, you already know this feeling.

The world comes at you louder, brighter, more intense than it seems to hit other people. Your nervous system isn't broken... it's running a more aggressive threat detection program where every sensation gets amplified.

Not because something is wrong with you.

Because your system is trying to protect you.

Think about a smoke alarm in your kitchen. It goes off when there's actual fire, sure, but it also goes off when you're just making toast. The alarm isn't malfunctioning - it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is detect potential danger and sound the alert even when the threat level doesn't quite match the response.

Your nervous system works the same way.

When you're highly sensitive, that alarm is set to maximum sensitivity. A whisper of smoke triggers a full response. A minor sensation becomes a major signal. The volume on everything gets turned way up, and your body stays on high alert even when there's no actual danger present.

This is chronic pain for many people.

Not tissue damage. Not structural problems that show up on scans. An overprotective nervous system that learned to amplify signals and can't figure out how to turn the volume back down.

Here's what changes everything...

Understanding this shifts your entire relationship with pain. Instead of fighting your body like it's the enemy, you start working with your nervous system like a partner. You're not trying to fix something broken - you're recalibrating something that's stuck in protection mode.

The pain is real.

100% real.

But the meaning changes. It's not "something is damaged and I'm falling apart." It's "my alarm system is overactive and I can teach it to recalibrate."

That difference? That's where healing actually begins.

When you stop seeing yourself as faulty and start seeing your nervous system as overprotective, you move from adversarial to collaborative. From helpless to capable. From broken to stuck in a pattern that can change.

Your sensitivity isn't a weakness. It's a nervous system doing its job a little too well.

And once you understand that, you can finally start turning down the volume.

What's your experience with this? Comment below if this reframe resonates with you, or share if someone you know needs to hear this today.

Sensitive? Your pain needs a different approach.You've heard it your whole life. "You're too sensitive." "Toughen up." "...
04/15/2026

Sensitive? Your pain needs a different approach.

You've heard it your whole life. "You're too sensitive." "Toughen up." "It's all in your head."

And when chronic pain showed up... those messages got louder.

Here's what nobody tells you: 20-33% of people have Sensory Processing Sensitivity, which is a neurobiological trait, not a personality flaw or something you need to fix about yourself. Your nervous system processes information differently. Pain included. You feel things in high definition.

When someone with this trait develops chronic pain, standard treatments often fail.

Not because you're doing something wrong.

Because those treatments weren't designed for nervous systems like yours.

Most pain protocols assume a certain baseline of nervous system function - they're built for the average response, the typical pain pathway, the standard way most people's bodies process threat signals. But your nervous system isn't average. It's more sensitive to input, more reactive to stimuli, more prone to sensitization.

That's not weakness.

That's neurobiology.

The problem isn't you. The problem is the treatment gap.

Your pain is 100% real, and it requires an approach that accounts for how your specific nervous system works - not just addressing the physical symptoms, but the nervous system dysregulation that amplifies them. The hypervigilance. The way benign touch can feel painful. The constant state of alert that exhausts you.

If your pain hasn't responded to standard treatment, this might be why.

Understanding your nervous system's wiring is the first step toward finding what actually works.

Like if you've ever been told you're "too sensitive" and then struggled to find pain relief that actually helps. Comment if this resonates with your experience.

Address

4849 Van Nuys Boulevard , Suite 202
Sherman Oaks, CA
91403

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 5pm
Tuesday 8:30am - 5pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 5pm
Thursday 8:30am - 5pm
Friday 8:30am - 5pm

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