Major nerdery ahead. You’ve been warned.
If you’ve been around for a bit, it won’t be much of a surprise to you that I’m frequently asked how to increase pain tolerance – that is, how to increase endurance and *decrease* the kind of sensitivities that require one to disengage from a scene before one is ready. In fact, I teach these coping mechanisms at this point. But recently, @BlackBoxOnFet asked me about ways to decrease pain tolerance — and while it’s not the first time I’ve been asked, that one’s definitely a bit rarer.
It’s something I think about sometimes myself. I am a masochist in the sense that consensually-provided acute pain often actually feels like pleasure to me, but I also enjoy suffering as service, something that I can’t do when I’m enjoying everything that’s happening to me. (My tolerance and simultaneous desire for suffering is part of why I love emotional S/m so much.) People might also want to decrease their pain tolerance because they are recognizing that in an effort to hurt more, their play is getting more dangerous than they’d like (or than their partner is okay with). And having a high pain tolerance is not without its risks, either — biologically, pain exists to warn us that something is wrong, and when we are used to ignoring pain, we may be less likely to notice signs of trouble that require urgent adjustments or treatments — so there may be safety *benefits* to decreasing tolerance in some cases.
Still, decreasing pain tolerance could be a tricky, dangerous game with big ethical implications. So let me be clearer than ever: consent is paramount. If you are a top, please do not engage in any of the following without your bottom requesting you to or other intensive negotiation. Without active initiative of the masochist, this is something that could result in anything from distrust to loss of self-esteem to an increase of sensitivity to chronic pains that that person hasn’t told you about, reducing their quality-of-life. So please understand this is but one simple blog post of ideas. Actively implementing them is an undertaking that should come with careful ethical, logistical, and end results-based consideration.
Method One: Changes to the Play Itself
This came as no surprise to me, but research confirms that pain is less well-tolerated when it is A) unexpected or B) something that cannot be avoided — something that happens in bondage of some sort. I think of a scene I once had in which I was pulled right out of a shower and zip-tied into a chair, meaning that I was both surprised by the pain to come (versus my usual planning, where I know when a scene will occur and can consider it and prepare mentally) and I was unable to engage in some of my movement-based coping. The feeling of being trapped also can increase fear, which does correlate to a lower tolerance.
Variety is another easy answer that maybe not everyone considers. I don’t just mean between toys that do basically the same thing as each other, though that too, but where on the body something is being inflicted, or what kind of play. I love impact. I love needles. I don’t so much love electricity. Though I’d say that subjectively, much of the impact I’ve engaged in has *hurt* more, I am less able to tolerate even less-painful electricity, partially because it isn’t something I’ve spent as much time getting used to.
Impact on wet skin, anecdotally (and from a bunch of people I’ve talked to as well), has decreased tolerance for me—or at least increased pain intensity (which is a bit different, but I think is still what people are sometimes asking with this).
And finally, there’s simply taking a break… hitting the reset button. Anecdotally, this has looked like anything from a few months to nearly a year in order to make a difference. Time away from intentional pain both recalibrates your body and mind to the sensations, and decreases the “I know what I’m doing; I can handle this” factor (and confidence in your ability to “take” pain absolutely increases your tolerance.)
Method Two: Simply Not Engaging in Tolerance-Increasing Activities
Another approach is consciously choosing not to engage in activities that can increase pain tolerance. Stripping away familiarity creates a more raw and intimate experience with pain and it often also demands a deeper level of self-awareness that’ll benefit you as a bottom in multiple realms. (There are lots of things here that just have to do with “healthy choices increase pain tolerance” and I am 100% NOT advocating you intentionally do the opposite. There are other options.)
Some of the research I share in my pain processing class is relevant here, but in looking at studies for this one, I found a few interesting things I’ll be implementing in my own play. Swearing, for instance, can increase pain tolerance by 33% (Stephens and Robertson, 2020), so purposefully abstaining from this linguistic release might take away that previously-used coping mechanism and make for a lower pain tolerance. Similarly, listening to preferred music has been found to increase pain tolerance (Timmerman et al., 2023). Though I don’t know that *disliked* music will *decrease* your pain tolerance, it’s worth knowing things like this, if a lower pain tolerance is your goal, so that you can purposefully avoid putting that extra buffer around your scenes.
Similarly, one study found that playing an FPS game *increases* pain tolerance as compared to a golf game — this attributed it to the higher arousal (Stephens and Allsop, 2012) — and another one found that it increases it as compared to a racing game, but did *not* attribute it to arousal (Teismann et al, 2014). (CW – this study, should you want to look it up, is about suicidality, but pain tolerance was one of the measures they used. I think it’s a flawed study in a number of ways but the pain thing is interesting to me.) So if you warm up for play with a nice lil game of Apex Legends or GTTOD or Titanfall 2, maybe don’t.
There are probably other safe-ish options here. One study found that the consumption of sweet foods increased pain threshold in adult males (Kakeda et al., 2008), so perhaps that falls under the “avoid this because it’ll give a buffer” category. And though this isn’t part of this category exactly, another study I found interesting gathered that “extended exposure to palatable food followed by abstinence from it induced a significant change in pain perception, leading to increased pain sensitivity” (Cifani et al., 2020), where palatable meant food that was high in sugar, fat, and salt — but this study was done in rats sooo I have no idea if it would replicate (and any kind of diet control has inherent risks that can be quite major, depending.)
Method Three: Things that Require Extreme Caution
There are a lot of those “research shows this increases pain tolerance things” that I would never, ever, ever recommend you purposefully engage in denying yourself/your bottom for a whole variety of reasons and will not mention here. But there are other things that could be done ethically and with fewer possible health risks. Still, note that these do have an increased level of risk, so once more… let this be a bottom-led initiative, and consider your risk profile very carefully.
Things in this category might include playing with less warm-up, which can intensify the impact of sudden, hard hits. But let me emphasize here that I’m talking about neglecting to warm-up with toys, not neglecting to warm up your body. It remains paramount to joint health that you bring your body through its full range of motion in order to both check in with yourself and your body awareness and to ensure that you are never making a sharp, sudden movement in a scene for the first time that day, increasing the chance of pulled tendons and the like.
Negative moods are also correlated with decreased pain tolerance (Tang et al., 2008), and one could intentionally choose to place scenes at these times by negotiating ahead of time. However, depending on the individual and the cause of the mood, these factors may also reduce the ability to accurately judge a situation and potentially leading to consent issues or trauma responses — or to a dependency on using kink to cope, rather than actually dealing with and managing your negative emotions. If you are a bottom, be sure that you discuss these with your top and get their consent just the same as they should be doing when it comes to things that’d affect you, as they may not be comfortable with these possibilities and their implications.
The last thing I’ll put here is that simply receiving threatening information about impending pain can decrease tolerance (Jackson et al., 2010). This could take the form of a top exaggerating, or telling the bottom about real risks without how likely they are. I know some might not see this as one of the “caution” options. However, I also strongly believe in bottoming education and that masochists must remain educated about the type of pain play they’re engaging in so that they can accurately judge if it’s within their risk profile and evaluate warning signs in the moment, so I wouldn’t personally recommend this with any kind of new partner. Research every new thing you try just as much as you expect your top to — otherwise, you have no way of verifying that said top actually did do this research and learn what they needed to to keep you safe.
Method Four: Mind Tricks
And that brings me to the realm of mind tricks — mindfucks, if you prefer — intentional manipulations that do require careful negotiation and enthusiastic consent, as they often take the same form as gaslighting. And hey, I’m into that, but if you don’t take caution here, you could destroy trust in a relationship (or at all) or induce a number of other negative psychological consequences.
The most obvious of these, to me, is hypnosis. I’ve recently had some of the most terrifying scenes of my life in this realm. It also has fucked with me in a number of ways. I love it; don’t do it without talking to far more experienced hypnosis bottoms (and tops!) than I about the challenges, methods, and risks.
There’s also the option of using conditioning — associating something you want to be more painful with a known phobia or perceived threat. Be careful, because conditioning is… well… effective. While fear of pain does decrease tolerance to that pain, that might not stay in the play-only realm, and we do need to be able to accept some amount of pain in our daily lives.
Finally is a fun one I learned about from @Neuromancer28: complimenting someone right before hurting them makes it hurt more. I haven’t tried this myself, buuuuut I did let my Owner know about it today so I imagine I’ll be testing it soon, heh. There’s incentive here for sadists to build their bottoms up, in general, and that’s the one thing in this list I think that sadists should feel totally free to go for without negotiation, heh. Better self-esteem, in general, seems to be linked to a decreased pain tolerance (Hooley et al., 2010). That citation is listed in this amazing list of Neuromancer28’s on Fetlife, along with many other pieces of interesting pain tolerance research that will likely be of interest to you if you’ve been liking this writing so far. He’s my go-to when it comes to science-backed kink stuff and also just generally awesome.
So to my friend who asked and anyone else, those are my thoughts. Thanks for the prompt. It was a great way to look at some more recent research and update the class, and I read all sorts of things that I’ve found really interesting (like this one, which found that pain tolerance in men goes up after a success and down after a failure, but the opposite is true in women) and got to really nerd out over here. (Goldberg et al., 2000).
Once more, every method discussed should only be employed with full consent and a thorough evaluation of associated risks — but there are very valid reasons bottoms may want to reduce pain tolerance for a period of time, and if that’s you, maybe there’s something new to try here. For those more interested in the opposite (or those looking to learn more about things that increase tolerance to make use of in my second method group here), I hope I’ll see you at “Make Me a Masochist: Changing Your Relationship with Pain” at some point in the future.
But what about you? Do you have any safe-ish methods to reduce pain tolerance to share?
Join the conversation in the comments on Fetlife!