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Why Self-Harm Feels Good in the Brain
By RICK NAUERT PHD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on August 31, 2010
Psych Central Journal Articles
As strange as it may sound, some individuals hurt themselves to obtain relief from emotional stress. Actions such as cutting or burning oneself are behaviors displayed by people who compulsively hurt themselves.
This behavior is sometimes evident among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). BPD is a condition that often leads to intense emotions among individuals who have difficulty regulating their emotions.
Accordingly, this group of people displays high prevalence rates of self-injurious behavior, which may help them to reduce negative emotional states.
Researchers have studied the effects of emotional stimuli and a thermal stimulus in people either with or without borderline personality disorder.
They conducted a brain imaging study using picture stimuli to induce negative, positive, or neutral affect and thermal stimuli to induce heat pain or warmth perception. The painful heat stimuli were administered at an individually-set temperature threshold for each subject.
In patients with borderline personality disorder, they found evidence of heightened activation of limbic circuitry in response to pictures evocative of positive and negative emotions, consistent with their reported emotion regulation problems.
Amygdala activation also correlated with self-reported deficits in emotion regulation. However, the thermal stimuli inhibited the activation of the amygdala in these patients and also in healthy controls, presumably suppressing emotional reactivity.
Dr. John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, “These data are consistent with the hypothesis that physically painful stimuli provide some relief from emotional distress for some patients with borderline personality disorder because they paradoxically inhibit brain regions involved in emotion. This process may help them to compensate for deficient emotional regulation mechanisms.”
The authors note that these results are in line with previous findings on emotional hyperactivity in borderline personality disorder and suggest that these individuals process pain stimuli differently depending on their arousal status.
