Poll: Physical or Emotional Pain?

[Spygon]

I can deal with physical pain but as having possibly of the most terrible few weeks of my life and still kinda reeling off it.I will say emotional pain is worse as it stay with you as its all in your mind so its near impossible to block it out.

Also it will always haunt you it does get easier over time but will never be fully gone.

Arent i the bucket of sunshine today lol

 

[plugav]

I suppose that in extreme cases either of them is unbearable. But unless we're talking about clinical depression, emotional pain is not as "real" as physical pain. I can still function with my many regrets, yet I'm very nearly incapacitated by a simple headache.

 

[smithy_2045]

Emotional, by far. It's much easier to find the root cause of physical pain and fix it.

Physical pain may be easier to stop but that's not the question.
Would you rather be shut in a dungeon with insults blasted in your ears 24/7 or be thrown in some shithole where a dude drills your teeth out with a rusty drill? I think I'd go with the insults.

If the person hurling the insults was someone I deeply and truly loved, and they genuinely believed every insult they threw my way, it would be at least as painful as the drill.

 

[Soods]

I've never felt emotional pain (me tough, me no feel anything, urgh urhg!), so I have to go with physical pain being worse.

 

[Jordi]

The worst possible physical pain is far, far, far more intense than the worst emotional pain, but I think that in general emotional pain is more likely to last longer. I voted physical, because at any one point in time it would be worse to be in the worst physical than the worst emotional pain.

But I'm not sure if that's the best criterion. You could say that the worst kind is the kind that has bothered you the most during your life, and I think that for most people it will be emotional pain. A lot of people will lose a loved one, have their heart broken or feel depressed, but most will not likely be tortured or severely burnt, and even if they were (and lived to tell the tale), it seems likely that they would have suffered some emotional pain in addition to the (at the time much worse) physical pain. And even in less extreme situations emotional pain can easily accompany physical pain: If you break a leg before an important tournament you may feel very disappointed, or if you are beaten up you may end up being too afraid to go outside after.

tl;dr: The worst physical pain is worse than the worst emotional pain, but I think most people are more likely to experience (and dwell on) emotional pain that is more towards the really bad end of the spectrum.

 

[Danny Ocean]

Physical pain in great enough quantities can physically kill you, I'd say it's worse.

Emotional pain in great enough quantities can make you kill yourself.

 

[SoulSalmon]

Physical pain in great enough quantities can physically kill you, I'd say it's worse.

Emotional pain in great enough quantities can make you kill yourself.

I'm going to sound like THE most insensitive dick in the world for pointing this out.
But killing yourself is stupid, it isn't the 'emotional pain' it's just someones dumb way of dealing with facts they don't like.

The real life version of a ragequit.

 

[ninjapenguin981]

Its physical, anyone who says emotional is being WHINY.

If you want proof; you cant be driven insane by emotional pain. You can be driven insane by torture. The deepest, darkest emotional pain has nothing on the deepest, darkest physical pain.

Emotional pain is more common, Ill give you that.

#

You can't be driven insane by emotional pain? Since when? I'd have thought that'd be more common than being driven insane by physical pain.

 

[Danny Ocean]

I'm going to sound like THE most insensitive dick in the world for pointing this out.

Yeah, you do kinda make yourself look like an insensitive dick, but you don't succeed in 'pointing' anything out, as if revealing a fact. All you did was express your opinion that suicide is illogical, which it's not.

Logic is a process. Given the correct inputs, the logical process will produce certain outputs. Your disagreement with those inputs does not make the conclusion any less valid; and your disagreement with those inputs can only ever be based on subjective standards, so you can't really judge.

You can try and persuade a suicidal person that there is more to gain from living, but one of the most important things I've learnt is that belittling a person or their motivation for doing things is a certain way to anger or upset them further. That's why your comment makes you look like an insensitive prick. You say that you don't really understand the concept, and it shows. Perhaps you'll get it when you're older and more experienced.

(N.B.: There's also the discovery that emotional and physical pain actually light up the same parts of the brain on MRI machines, so that's something to add to this thread.)

 

[Captain_Fantastic]

seeing as im horrible with biting my nails and i have a clumsy tendency to injure myself there is usually something on me with at least a little bit of physical pain. so im used to that feeling to a point, i still dont like it but i can deal with.

the feeling of lonliness i get occasionally from having so little chance where i live to get a girlfriend with more depth than a bottlecap, can get so bad that it brings my movement to a halt not to mention the number of Subconscious mental blocks i put on myself for merely having this limit is noticeable.

 

[Daniel_Rosamilia]

Emotional pain.
I've put up with a lot of physical pain (surgery, needles, weeks upon weeks of gastro, beatings) and emotional pain (family members dying, depression, planning suicide) and the emotional pain took a far worse toll on me than the physical ever did.
But that's just me.

 

[Dusty Fred]

Difficult to definitively say which is worse. At least with emotional pain the things you take for it -alcohol, tobacco, angry music- are enjoyable, whereas tablets and medicine for physical pain are merely functional.

 

[Sansha]

Physical pain gets the adrenalin pumping and, once treated, creates a euphoric feeling as one recovers as the pain dissipates and recovery progresses. There's something oddly satisfying about being severely limited in day-to-day activities, and slowly being able to do more and more as you heal up.

Emotional pain, meanwhile, can cripple a person with seemingly no end in sight, and it's extraordinarily difficult to treat. I hate it.

 

[Macgyvercas]

Oh god, I'll take physical pain over emotional any day. Physical pain I can shrug off and ignore. Emotional, I can't.

 

[SoulSalmon]

Words were here.

Just quick props on a reply with some thought behind it rather then the troll I was expecting

I suppose what it all boils down to is my own personal inability to grasp WHAT kind of logic could lead someone to believe "Dying is obviously the best option for me"...

I can somewhat understand suicide brought on from physical pain, IE "This pain is excruciating, I want it to stop at any cost".
But emotional pain? something thats very existence can be questioned?

I just don't think I'll ever get it...
So yeah, I suppose I am an insensitive prick if you word it like that.

 

[Last Hugh Alive]

Hard to say. I've never had any real injury or been in any excruciating physical pain so I wouldn't know how bad that can get. But at least physical pain is straight forward - you know what's causing the pain and you know that no matter how bad it is, it will heal.

I am familiar with emotional stress, though. Fear, anger, hopelessness, loss... and ESCPECIALLY depression! A lot of the time you don't know how to deal with it, what the source of the problem is, or if you're even depressed in the first place. Emotional pain is complicated, obscures your decisions and you don't know when or if it will go away. So my answer is emotional pain, if just for how complex it is.

That's just based off my experience.

 

[Skrag The Summoner]

one thing to remember is that a lot of physical pain can cause emotional/mental pain
(on topic i think that getting the emotional pain first up is better than physical due to my previous statement)

 

[TheHappySquid]

After 16 years of sticking a needle into your skin >4 times a day, you get used to physical pain. Emotional is worse.


Fuck you, Diabetes

 

[JLML]

I can't say it's 100% certainly worse, as I haven't experienced all kinds of each version of pain, but from experience I say emotional pain. I've broken a few bones here and there, and trust me when I say that I'd rather do that again than have to deal with the mental pain of... Stuff...

 

[mgirl]

For me, physical pain is much worse.

I suffered bullying from the age of about 6, to being about 16 years old, and over that time, you kinda get used to it, and you develop coping mechanisms, and it just stops affecting you so much.

A broken bone, however, always hurts a lot.