We're a hardy bunch.....

Very quickly… in the ‘Health & Science’ section of ‘This Week’ magazine, October 11th 2025, there was a short piece on how musicians experience pain differently.

Now we all have our aches and pains, and the guitarists among us will certainly know the discomfort of sore fingertips, but many experience chronic pain due to the way they sit and hold their instruments, and the repetitive nature of playing. I don’t remember where I heard it first, it’s not my concept, but I often complain of ‘gigamortis’ - which is the general muscle ache I suffer after the day of a big gig where I’ve had to lump heavy speakers around and jump around like an idiot for two hours or more…..

Anyway, researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have discovered that musicians actually react to pain differently. They induced a harmless muscular ache to 39 musicians and non-musicians alike… (I’ve got to say the article is pretty sketchy on exactly what the nature of this ache was….) but scans showed that the pain got progressively worse for non musicians, whilst in the brains of musicians, the level was unchanged.

I myself have developed a high tolerance for the pain caused by people shouting ‘play Wonderwall’ at me in pubs, simply because I’m holding an acoustic guitar, as if no other song in existence used one…..but it does appear that because musicians have to generally push through the discomfort of playing and practicing that our brains have literally rewired themselves to tolerate it better. Who’d have thunk?

The overall conclusion is obvious then - we’re simply better humans ;-)